[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Quoth

By design the LLM / Generative AI "makes stuff up". It's applying statistics to all the scraped data. It "knows" nothing. Like 1960s Eliza bot it will echo back, so if you write "That doesn't exist", then likely you get a fake apology.

Use search with AI disabled.

Yes, I agree for the most part.

But the reality is that it's not going to go away right now. Google doesn't even index sites that block AI scraping now, for example.

Spoiler:

While Cloudflare blocks almost all AI crawlers, there’s one particular bot it cannot block without affecting its customers’ online presence — Google. The search giant combined its search and AI crawler into one, meaning users who opt out of Google’s AI crawler won't be indexed in Google search results. “You can’t opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge — it’s crazy,” Prince continued. “It shouldn’t be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow.”

And people with less understanding are going to be mislead; I'm just suggesting a guardrail that will at least help a bit.

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I just tried this, also with a fanfiction story. The LLM is Gemini. It said outright that it is unable to provide the summary, because it couldn't find this title by this author.

I didn't give it any instructions to say so if it didn't know.

Nice. My understanding is that the companies are trying to train for more 'I don't know' due to all the publicity about hallucinations.

EDIT:

When I gave it a real book from 2010 ("Against The Tide" by John Ringo) using the built-in prompt, it ruminated for minutes before coming back again with a made up premise, etc.

Adding "If you don't know anything, say that you don't know anything," it finished much faster with "I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information on that book."