Being biased is not the same as hallucinating. LLMs have both problems.
At least you could check whether a source was reputable and where the bias was. With LLM's the connection between the answer and the source is completely lost. You can't even tell why it answered a certain way.
> Being biased is not the same as hallucinating. LLMs have both problems.
I didn't deny either of those things, I said that search engines also hallucinate — my actual link gave several examples, including "King of the United States" -> "Barack Obama".
Just because it showed the link to breitbart doesn't mean it was not hallucinating.
> At least you could check whether a source was reputable and where the bias was.
The former does not imply the latter. You could tell where a search engine got an answer from, but not which answers were hidden — an argument that I saw some on the American right make to criticise Google for failing to show their version of events.
> With LLM's the connection between the answer and the source is completely lost. You can't even tell why it answered a certain way.
Also not so. The free version of ChatGPT supports search directly, so it allows you to have references.
> I said that search engines also hallucinate — my actual link gave several examples
They don't. Google added a weird widget that do hallucinate. But the result list is still accurate, even though it may be biased towards certain sources.
> You could tell where a search engine got an answer from, but not which answers were hidden
A bit pedantic, but a search engine returns a list of results according to the query you posted. There's no question-answer oracle. If you type "King of the United States", you will get pages that have the terms listed. Maybe there will be semantic manipulations like "King -> Head of state -> President", but generally it's on you to post the correct keywords.
Except for all the times the search results were wrong answers.
https://searchengineland.com/when-google-gets-it-wrong-direc...