Before we would find an intriguing post on the internet from years ago, and you have to verify it with additional research--it's easy to skip that additional research.
With a LLM when you're skeptical you can interogate it. One thing we know for sure is LLMs are quick to admit mistakes were made when interrogated, comically so. A LLM might not always recognize its own mistake, but at least it is available for easy interogation, unlike the forum posts of old.
Manual research from reputable sources remains an option.
In my experience every LLM out there is utterly useless and quickly defaults into "here are other concerts that took place around that time near that location". Google Search (ignoring the AI overview) is even more useless, as it refuses to show literally any webpage that's older than say 5 years. YouTube search is genuinely better than Google at surfacing old and grainy fan-made videos uploaded in like 2010, but also defaults into synonyms nonsense pretty quickly.
But, the search functionality of exactly one forum and three local news websites that I know have an archive that dates back long enough beats every single one of those abovementioned every single time. Three people are talking about their experience at a concert on a random 15+ year old forum thread? It happened. The tiny list of 5 or so (Google-hosted!) Blogspot blogs I have bookmarked? They usually have a photo of the ticket that Google Images refuses to show me.
Not only are search engines completely dead as a category, but LLMs are a shit replacement for them. "We" (okay, Google specifically) has truly committed a crime comparable to burning the Library of Alexandria. Everything older than a decade that wasn't properly documented on Wikipedia is just gone, never to be seen again.
The funny part of this is that Google search is intentionally bad at returning YouTube videos, presumably because some anti-trust action scared them into artificially ranking videos from local news sites, Facebook, and other ad-walled content ahead of YouTube videos. Seriously, go watch a YouTube video, then try googling its title with “video” appended to it, and see if the “Videos” tab of google search ranks it as the first result.
It's usually uploaded by a channel with like 20 subscribers and has maybe like 300 views, but YouTube would rather show me some artist playing a similar genre on the other side of the continent with millions of views that was recently uploaded than a video from an event I specifically typed into a search bar.
It's a great tool, but verify the important things (or do them yourself)
Signal to noise has taken a dramatic hit.
AI shouldn’t have any reason to lie. But its lies aren’t intentional. It’s just actually making things up and “hallucinating” when it pretends that an option or setting exists, or confidently claims something entirely untrue, and makes up a source to go with it. For something Google is willing to shove into the top of every search result it’s crazy the percentage of time the answer is blatantly incorrect.