Thanks for pointing out the elephant in the room with LLMs.
The basic design is non-deterministic. Trying to extract "facts" or "truth" or "accuracy" is an exercise in futility.
You can't blame an LLM for getting the facts wrong, or hallucinating, when by design they don't even attempt to store facts in the first place. All they store are language statistics, boiling down to "with preceding context X, most statistically likely next words are A, B or C". The LLM wasn't designed to know or care that outputting "B" would represent a lie or hallucination, just that it's a statistically plausible potential next word.
On one level I agree, but I do feel it’s also right to blame the LLM/company for that when the goal is to replace my search engine of choice (my major tool for finding facts and answering general questions), which is a huge pillar of how they’re sold to/used by the public.
Even before LLMs people were asking Google search questions rather than looking for keyword matches, and now coupled with ChatGPT it's not surprising that people are asking the computer to answer questions and seeing this as a replacement for search. I've got to wonder how the typical non-techie user internalizes the difference between asking questions of Google (non-AI mode) and asking ChatGPT?
Clearly people asking ChatGPT instead of Google could rapidly eat Google's lunch, so we're now getting "AI overview" alongside search results as an attempt to mitigate this.
I think the more fundamental problem is not just the blurring of search vs "AI", but these companies pushing "AI" (LLMs) as some kind of super-human intelligence (leading to uses assuming it's logical and infallible), rather than more honestly presenting it as what it is.