In casual situations I think it’s basically okay to cite an LLM if you have a good sense of what sorts of facts LLMs are unlikely to hallucinate, namely, well-established facts that are easy to find online (because they appear a lot in the training data). But for those sorts of facts, you can turn on LLM web search and it will find a reliable source for you and then you can cite that source instead.
I think it’s okay to cite LLMs for things along the lines of “I asked Claude for a list of fun things to do in Toronto and here’s what it came up with”.
I don’t cite LLMs for objective facts.
In casual situations I think it’s basically okay to cite an LLM if you have a good sense of what sorts of facts LLMs are unlikely to hallucinate, namely, well-established facts that are easy to find online (because they appear a lot in the training data). But for those sorts of facts, you can turn on LLM web search and it will find a reliable source for you and then you can cite that source instead.
I think it’s okay to cite LLMs for things along the lines of “I asked Claude for a list of fun things to do in Toronto and here’s what it came up with”.
If an Anthropic data scientist in a high-profile legal case can be hoodwinked by bad citations, I don’t think that it is realistic at all to think that anyone can have a “good sense of what sorts of facts LLMs are unlikely to hallucinate”.
And I thought we all have heard about lists of fun things to do full of non-existent restaurants in the way to non-existent towns?