No. of Recommendations: 13
If you know something about the topic you’re searching, you won’t be surprised sometimes to find mistakes, poorly drawn statistics, or outright hallucinations included in the summary.
...
I'll second that. AI search is basically useless for most things I have to look for professionally.
...
From just looking at basic tax law, it's spot on, does a good job...
One thing I find them good at is summarizing an existing document or corpus, perhaps explaining the good tax checklists. There is no need to make stuff up or attempt reasoning, so they don't.
Beyond that, check *everything*. I like the way Perplexity gives footnotes for what source it's citing for each statement, but more and more they seem to be web pages which are themselves either AI slop or "some guy on Reddit".
The typical LLM is like a person who knows a truly enormous amount of stuff having read absolutely everything on the web, but unfortunately believed it all, and has an imperfect memory to boot. Ask for the most reliable hammer and it will either cite a brochure from a hammer manufacturer, or recommend a very good tool company that doesn't offer hammers.
Jim
