alt Hacker NewsWait, I'm not saying "all things" need equal checking. I'm saying that in policy arguments, I double check stats (or heavily down-weight them) regardless of their origin.
At this point, I've done enough policy work with AIs that my concern about hallucinated statistics is... reduced? I don't know what the right word is. I know what kinds of extended setups will get them to say crazy things and I know what kinds of narrow questions will generate genuinely reasonable and interesting answers. Meanwhile, I also know that every policy position paper ever written by a human has abused statistics in one way or another. So: six of one.
Certainly if you had prompted the LLM that's a reasonable position. But you believe that the addition of an LLM to a human who would otherwise abuse statistics to produce outcomes they desire is to result in statistics that are more likely to be true? So if I took a spam email and passed it through an LLM this would make it more reputable?
It would seem to me that the addition of the LLM to the mix is likely to result in output that is more likely to be aligned to the human writing it and less likely to be aligned with me, as the reader, conditional on the human being the kind who abuses statistics one way or another.
But everyone's epistemics are different. Reality will tell us over time where we land with our methods.