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I am currently doing some research into historical details for a video game using major LLMs and it's almost great. They give you great answers, explain their reasoning and suggest interesting angles to explore. Much better than Google, which has gotten terrible at pointing me at good primary and secondary sources.
The only problem is that they give you completely different answers! Of course, I could just rely on how plausible their answers sound (if they can fool me, they can fool the players), but I am too neurotic for that.
How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?
P.S. Lem was fucking prescient. I know Vinge had the same idea, but Lem was there first.
Are you using "thinking mode" or "research mode" with your LLM(s)? With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens, but at least ChatGPT 5 has gotten good enough with "reasoning" that I haven't caught it in an error in output from that. (Some of this might be selection bias, though: waiting 5 minutes for a response is enough hassle that I'll still ask for immediate-output-spew for anything that's easy enough to double-check myself or non-critical enough that I can live with a few mistakes)
I still wouldn't rely on any claim for which it can't give me either a step-by-step proof or a linked citation, and with history you're stuck with citations as your only option, so ask for (and follow up on, and worry about the quality of the sources of) those.
You want to keep your narrated facts straight, and you want your worldbuilding to be consistent with the facts, but don't be afraid to add a few sets of conflicting lies and half-truths to your dialogue. There's only one past, but there are sometimes multiple conflicting histories of it and there are often multiple conflicting perspectives on it. Consider the Brazilian vs the American attitudes toward Santos-Dumont vs the Wright brothers.
The other day I needed the equation for the voltages of two capacitors over time when charged initially to different voltages and connected via a resistor. That's simplest possible system of two differential equations, first term of the first year university level math. IOW it's the very opposite of "advanced math".
I wrote down the equations and asked ChatGPT to solve for V1(t) and V2(t). It spent a long time thinking and gave a confident answer with a bunch of "I can also give ..." extras. Too bad it was wrong. I changed the variable names to make it look closer to a basic textbook problem and after a bunch more thinking it gave a different wrong answer. Finally I simplified the problem so much that it became useless (fixed initial values to 1 and 0 respectively) to make it even more textbooky and I finally got a correct answer. Too bad it was useless. Finally I just ended up googling how to present such systems to Matlab symbolic math toolbox and got the answer I actually needed in the first place.
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