In the 90s we could reasonably trust that that the major news sites and corporate websites was true, while random forums required a bit more critical reading. Today even formerly trusted sites may be using LLMs to generate content along with automatic translations.
I wouldn't necessarily put the blame on LLMs, this just make it easier. The trolls and spammers was always there, now they just have a more powerful tool. The commercial sites now have a tool they don't understand, which they apply liberally, because it reduces cost, or their staff use it, to get out of work, keep up with deadlines or to cover up incompetence. So, not the fault of the LLMs, but their use is worsening existing trends.
Yep - or they're commingling promotional content with their journalism, a la Forbes / CNN / CNET / About.com / etc. There's still quality content online but it's getting harder to find under the tidal wave of garbage.
I think that previous generations were not any different. For most people, trusting is the default mode and you need to learn to distrust a source. I know many people who still have not learned that about the internet in general. These are often older people. They believe insane things just because there exists a nicely looking website claiming that thing.
Now it's not even the website of undetermined providence that is believed; positions are established based on just the headline, shared 2nd or 3rd hand!
I received the same warnings, actually it was more like “don’t trust everything you read on the internet”, but it quickly became apparent that the last three words were redundant, and could have been rephrased more accurately as “don’t trust everything you read and hear and see”.
Our parents and teachers were living with their own fallacious assumptions and we just didn’t know it at the time, but most information is very pliable. If you can’t change what someone sees, then you can probably change how they see it.
Indeed. When I was 14-18 in the UK, the opinion pieces in the news were derogatorily describing "media studies" as "Mickey Mouse studies".
In retrospect such courses were teaching critical analysis of media sources, in much the same way that my history GCSE went into the content of historical media and explored how both primary and secondary sources each had the potential to be either accurate or biased.
Even now, even here, I see people treat the media itself as pure and only the people being reported upon as capable of wrongdoing — e.g. insisting that climate scientists in the 70s generally expected an imminent ice age, because that's what the newspapers were saying.
The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet".
I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a majority of the kids trust what the computer says by default. Not just LLMs, but generally what they read. That's such a huge shift from my generation. Maybe LLM education will shift people back toward skepticism - unlikely, but I can hope.