Fuck AI

You're arguing against the use of AI to do actual research. I agree with you that using AI to do research is wrong. I'm not sure where you got any other idea.

My entire point, the statement that I was responding to, was a claim that LLMs hallucinate sources. That's only true of naive uses of LLMs, if you just ask a model to recite a fact it will hallucinate a lot of the time. This is why they are used in RAG systems and, in these systems, the citations are tracked through regular software because every AI researcher knows that LLMs hallucinate. That hasn't been new information for 5+ years now.

Systems that do RAG search summarizations, as in my example, both increase the accuracy of the response (by inserting the source documents in to the context window) and avoid relying on LLMs to handle citations.

It's one thing to hate the damage that billionaires are doing to the world in order to chase some pipedream about AI being the holy grail of technology. I'm with you there, fuck AI.

It's a whole other thing to pretend that machine learning is worthless or incapable of being a good tool in the right situations. You've been relying on machine learning tools for a long time, you say 'learn to search properly'. The search results that you receive are entirely built on ancestors of the PageRank machine learning algorithm which is responsible for creating Google.

The only reason that AI is even on your radar (assuming you're not in academia) is because a bunch of rich assholes are exploiting people's amazement at this new technology to sell impossible dreams to people in order to cash in on the ignorance of others. Those people are scammers with MBAs, but their scam doesn't change the usefulness of the underlying technology of Transformer neural networks or Machine Learning in general.

Fighting against 'AI' is pointless if your target is LLMs and not billionaires.