You Own It

I keep seeing how “LLMs are great teaching tools! I asked it to explain X to me and it did!”

Don’t be fooled!

Ask it to explain a technical topic you deeply understand and you’ll start to see where it makes things up.

It is a predictive text engine. Sure, you can do all sorts of prompt hacking to get better results. But at the end of the day, if you don’t know the topic really well you will never know if it made up the facts it gave you.

But someone else reading your work will.

An LLM is not an expert. It was trained on data from experts as well as and students and anyone who could make a web page full of info.

Use LLMs to accelerate things you already know. Use it for things that are faster for you to verify than it is for you to start from scratch.

You are ultimately responsible for the output you make using any inputs you take. Whether it came from an LLM, Stack Overflow, or a random blog post, if you use it, you own it. Verify it.