Of course. But when you see text in the descriptor of a satchel on a satchel seller's site, you contextualize it as marketing. If you saw the same text in a textbook on the history, design, and manufacturing of satchels, you would contextualize it very differently.

When an LLM is the lens through which you view that text, you often don't have the context of where it came from, and the LLM is often really bad at filtering trustworthiness based on context when retrieving information to answer a query with.

I wouldn't go to a random site with a sketchy URL to get the customer service number for my xyz. I'd go to their official domain. Thus successfully navigating the treacherous waters scammers attempt to muddy.

How do you get the poison out of the water in the well? I understand the way this is supposed to work on the web, there are support channels to deal with this sort of thing. But if the deceit is baked into the model, what is your recourse?

The difference is context. With human cheating, the intent is usually a bit easier to spot.

IMO, it's similar to what's happening with code. People have been shipping sloppy code and fake news forever. It's just that the cost of doing these things has fallen off a cliff.

Sure but the agents obfuscate the signals you might use to judge the authority/trustworthiness of search results. They get disinformation results, wrap it into a reasonably sounding report, present it to you as trustworthy. There are so many ways for bad actors to game the system

> Isn't all of this true for a human-used internet as well?

Yes, but if you read this "semantic" info directly from a site, you can judge the site and its potential biases, and decide for yourself "this sells Louis Vuitton, of course they will praise their handbags". Or to pick a more extreme example that nobody would ignore, if you somehow land on an extremist website spewing racist crap, your alarms will surely trigger by anything they say.

But through an LLM this gets whitewashed and presented as authoritative and "neutral", when it isn't. You might know not to trust the LLM either (if you're paying attention; we all have our unconscious biases) but I bet you most people will be caught off guard.

The primary purpose of Google is to stop that. You have 100% trust in Google results because of the effort they have put into cleaning the results you see.

Billions have been spent on it.

Try searching Bing sometime. First result for Firefox is a malware clone site (you’ll have to scroll past the malware ad to see it).