The difference is a calculator always returns 2+2=4. And even then if you ended up with 6 instead of 4, the fact you know how to do addition already leads you to believe you fat fingered the last entry and that 2+2 does not equal 6.
Can’t say the same for LLM. Our teachers were right with the internet of course as well. If you remember those early internet wild west school days, no one was using the internet to actually look up a good source. No one even knew what that meant. Teachers had to say “cite from these works or references we discussed in class” or they’d get junk back.
Right so apply the exact same logic to LLMs as you did to the internet.
At first the internet was unreliable. Nobody could trust the information it gave you. So teachers insisted that students only use their trusted sources. But eventually the internet matured and now it would be seen as ridiculous for a teacher to tell a student not to do research on the internet.
Now replace "the internet" with "LLMs".
Most teachers would never let you grab any random internet source. We always had to get decent sources. Actual journal articles from our library’s JSTOR subscription would often be a hard requirement for a certain number of sources. Citing the text we used in class or other reference material we had access to as well. It was never free rein anything goes, unless that has changed.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Only to point out that in the early days of the internet, even into the 00s, teachers had a Hard No rule on any internet source.
I graduated high school in '04 and even then I was only allowed to use this system called "Galileo" which was basically a curated listed of encyclopedic articles specifically meant for education and research.