this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 3 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] uis@lemm.ee 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

LLMs can't cite. They don't know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

LLMs can cite. It's called Retrival-Augmented Generation. Basically LLM that can do Information Retrival, which is just academic term for search engines.

You'd be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

You can just print retrival logs into references. Well, kinda stretching definition of "just".

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

My question is that the thing they are citing actually exists and if it does exist, contains the information it claims.

[–] FutileRecipe@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Depends. In my experience, it usually does exist. Now there are hallucinations where GPT makes up stuff or just misinterprets what it read. But it's super easy to read the GPT output, look at the cited work, skim works for relevance, then tweak the wording and citing to match.

If you just copy/paste and take GPT's word for it without the minimal amount of checking, you're digging your own grave.

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

the thing they are citing actually exists

In case of RAGs it exists in searched dataset.

and if it does exist, contains the information it claims.

Not guaranteed.