If they didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have returned them

And yet I’ve had Bing’s Copilot/ChatGPT (with plugins like Consensus), Gemini, and Perplexity do exactly that, but worse. Sometimes they’ll cite sources that don’t mention anything related to the answer they’ve provided because the information they’re giving is based on some other training data they can’t source. They were asked to provide a source, but won’t necessarily give you the source. Hell, sometimes they’ll answer an adjacent just to spit out an answer–any answer–to fulfill the request.

LLMs are simply not the appropriate tool for the job. This is most obvious when you need the specificity and accuracy.