I was chatting with some folks the other day and somebody was going on about how they had gotten asymptomatic long-COVID from the vaccine. When asked about her sources her response was that AI had pointed her to studies and you could viscerally feel everybody else's cringe.

Assuming this AI shit doesn't kill us all and we make it to the conclusion that robots writing lies on websites perhaps isn't the best thing for the internet, there's gonna be a giant hole of like 10 years where you just shouldn't trust anything written online. Someone's gonna make a bespoke search engine that automatically excludes searching for anything from 2023 to 2035.

I can't really fault them for it tbh. Google has gotten so fucking bad over the last 10 years. Half of the results are just ads that don't necesarily have anything to do with your search.

Sure, use something else like Duckduckgo, but when you're already switching, why not switch to something that tends to be right 95% of the time, and where you don't need to be good at keywords, and can just write a paragraph of text and it'll figure out what you're looking for. If you're actually researching something you're bound to look at the sources anyway, instead of just what the LLM writes.

The ease of access of LLMs, and the complete and utter enshittyfication of Google is why so many people choose an LLM.

They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.

Was it really "like that" for any length of time? To me it seems like most people just believed whatever bullshit they saw on Facebook/Twitter/Insta/Reddit, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to have so many bots pushing political content there. Before the internet it would be reading some random book/magazine you found, and before then it was hearsay from a relative.

I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research. It doesn't matter if it's thru a library, or a search engine, or Wikipedia sources, or AI sources. As long as you know how to read the actual source, compare it with other (probably contradictory) information, and synthesize a conclusion for yourself, you'll be fine; if you didn't want to do that it was always easy to stumble upon misinfo or disinfo anyways.

One actual problem that AI might cause is if the actual scientists doing the research start using it without due diligence. People are definitely using LLMs to help them write/structure the papers ¹. This alone would probably be fine, but if they actually use it to "help" with methodology or other content... Then we would indeed be in trouble, given how confidently incorrect LLM output can be.