this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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its a useful tool for me doing research.
Yeah because it was impossible to Google things in the past. Every time anybody comes up with a use for AI it's basically just automating something that isn't even that hard for you to do. If you want to automate simple tasks that's absolutely fine but it's not the second coming as people keep insisting.
Come back to me when an AI can actually add value to something, when it can do something that is not just automating a simple task, but it's capable of doing things that humans are not. I keep being told that we're only a few years away from the technological singularity, so wake me up when we actually get there.
What kind of research do llms actually help with?
In my experience, if the answer can't be found in the top google results, the AI simply makes shit up.
The fact that it lies is so irritating, if it at least admitted that it didn't know the answer it would at least be a useful search engine. The fact that it makes stuff up though means I always have to scroll past the AI summary, that I didn't ask for, in order to actually go to the website to check the results myself, because I can't trust it.
The worst part is that mostly lies for things that aren't immediately obvious, so you ask it "what is the color of the sun" and it appears to work just fine, but the moment you use it for any real research, it will just fabricate things wholecloth.
thats completely false when you only ask the llm a very basic question like "what color is the sun?" you need to talk to the model like its smarter than a google search engine. "what color is the sun? pull the data from scientific articles and other sites that study the sun"
if you google the first question, you will have list of different pages, where if you use AI to search on your query, it will model an answer from thoese sources, with said sources linked, similar to a Wikipedia page.
There are thousands of papers on the color of the sun, its trivial to google a paper, if you need an LLM to do this, that's on you. But if you ask it valve clearances for an indonesian motorbike in english, it will make it up, even though the service manual is available in Indonesian. If you ask it how to synthesize a chemical that nobody bothers to write about because its uninteresting or impossible, it will straight up lie.
i think that learning to prompt AI is somthing people lack as a skill and then call it bad and a liar like its some intelligence when it isn't
OK, instead of "lie", I should have said it produces incorrect information any time the answer isn't obvious from a cursory google search, and does so in a way that deceives anyone who isn't already familiar enough with the subject that they didn't need to ask in the first place.
It's fine for asking it to generate answers you could have typed out yourself, such as boilerplate code and "what color is the sun".