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Comment by nessbot | Hacker News Reader

"But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published." - What? This is the kind of misunderstanding of knowledge that AI boosters present that drives me insane.

And last sentences conflate a PhD with a google search or even dictionary lookup. I mean, c'mon!

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I'm not talking about learning practical skills like research and teaching, or laboratory skills. I'm talking about the factual knowledge. Academia is built on open publishing. Do you disagree?

And the things I'm looking up just can't be found in Google or a dictionary. It's something defined in some random paper from 1987, further developed by someone else in 1998, that the author didn't cite.

And something that lead you to that paper would be wonderful but instead you have been disconnected from the social side of scholarship and forced to take the AI "at its word".

I've also seen AI just completely make up nonsense out of nowhere as recently as last week.

Huh? Nobody's forcing me to "take the AI at its word". It's the easiest thing to verify.

And I've got enough of the social side of scholarship already. Professors don't need me emailing them with questions, and I don't need to wait days for replies that may or may not come.

How do you verify it or connect it with other papers if it gives you a summary instead of linking to the paper itself?

You literally ask it for the paper(s) and author(s) associated, put them into Google Scholar, and go read them. If it hallucinates a paper title, Scholar will usually find the relevant work(s) anyways because the author and title are close enough. If those fail, you Google some of the terms in the explanation, which is generally much more successful than Googling the original query. If you can't find anything at all, then it was probably a total hallucination, and you try the prompt a different way. That probably happens less than 1% of the time, however.

I mean, it's all just kind of common sense how to use an LLM.

Fair enough, if you're using it as a better way to find relevant papers I have no complaints.

I've mainly seen it used for getting answers without needing to or even being able to access the original source.

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