New Delhi, June 22 -- There is a seductive promise at the heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. These tools, we are told, will democratize knowledge. The student in Chennai will have access to the same analytical horsepower as the consultant in Manhattan. The small business owner will conjure in an afternoon what once required a team of specialists. Barriers of access, cost and geography will dissolve. We are all experts now.

It is a compelling idea. It is also precisely backwards. Large language models do not dispense knowledge. Rather, what they offer is fluent, confident output sampled from a probability distribution. The distinction matters enormously because such output is indistinguishable from knowledge, unless you...