There is a human/user element here as well - will the users check the citations, if they are provided inline? I recall in the early ChatGPT web search and Perplexity days, most of the citations didn't work (made up, or 404). You get a false sense of security by having a "[1]" next to the stat or a claim. Maybe labs companies should have some additional quality ranking/checks on these, if it's in their interest of course.
I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.
My initial experience with Perplexity was it citing AI blog spam as a primary source so consistently I immediately dropped my subscription. (this was over a year ago, I haven't re-evaluated them since)
A full 40% of AI stats actually have a specific study behind them? Knowing how the human baseline is that 73.6%* of all statistics are made up on the spot, this is really encouraging.
*That particular stat was of course made up, but not by me.
Just an thinly veiled ad for something called trakkr. Not to mention that none of these "stats" actually matter aside from being the type of thing that a consultant would put in a pitch deck, at which point their accuracy doesn't matter anyways
when people say "there should be no AI taught in schools ever. prompting? what skill is there in talking to a liar bot?" this is where they are dead wrong. Being correctly critical of LLM output is a huge skill and news flash it applies to people and human-written things too.
Being skeptical/critical isn't a skill, it's an attitude, a state of mind. An education that requires you to find your own information and sources manually breeds that state of mind. Giving LLMs to kids (or even adults) nurtures the opposite. It's like taking them to McDonald's every day and telling them to eat healthy. Yes there's a salad on the menu, but it's rarely going to be chosen.
Of course the reality that adults do trust AI uncritically because it's the path of least resistance means the traditional education I mentioned above wasn't sufficient. But that's all the more reason not to introduce a variable that makes things worse.
(Or at least they used to, I think they changed everything recently, but I've mostly stopped using them.)
*That particular stat was of course made up, but not by me.
Of course the reality that adults do trust AI uncritically because it's the path of least resistance means the traditional education I mentioned above wasn't sufficient. But that's all the more reason not to introduce a variable that makes things worse.