Wikipedia: it’s an encyclopedia. Fine for a general overview of a topic, but you need to follow it to primary sources if you want to make an authoritative argument.

Google: it’s got an AI summary at the top and a bunch of SEO’d results on the first pages.

LLMs: really good at translating a lot of content down into something that’s easy to read. Not necessarily easy to understand, not necessarily accurate, not citing it’s sources accurately, but easy to read.

So: where do people’s attitudes come from towards them?

We now have 25 years of Wikipedia. That means that for 25 years, anyone in school from K through university has had it drilled i to them “you can’t use Wikipedia as a primary source!” Which is often interpreted by kids (now adults) as “don’t trust Wikipedia!”

Google has been around for 28 years. When it started, the other search engines always missed things, had a bunch of ads, and were slow. Google was this fast clean interface that could instantly find whatever you were looking for on the world wide web, and the exact human created content you wanted would almost always be featured on the first page of results. People who grew up with that might be slow to catch on to the fact that Google today doesn’t do that. So they trust the results and assume the information they’re looking for must be there somewhere on the first page.

LLMs are new. They hold the promise of early Google in that they crawled all the source material for you and present a summary so you don’t even have to decide which link has the right answer. They haven’t been around long enough for a generation to be trained to distrust the messages they provide.