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The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.
To be fair, humans were already diluting it in a great sea of excrement, the robots just came to take our job and do it even faster and better.
The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
Bruh did you ever went to 4chan or Reddit? The Internet turned to a dumpster fire long time before AI.
Everyone knew that you don’t go to 4chan for information or knowledge
It’s still part of the Internet, if you can just pick and choose what Parts we are talking about, then the Internet ist still fine 🥸
But now all of the internet got incorporated into a magic 8-ball and when it gives you it’s random bullshit, you don’t know is it quoting anon from 4chan or a scientific paper or a journal or random assortment of words. And you don’t have any way to check it in confines of the system
I mean google was already like this before GenAI.
Its a nightmare to find anything you’re actually looking for and not SEO spam.
Gen AI cuts out some of that noise but it has its own problems too.
You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You’d have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.
And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.
Oh yeah I remember the AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Dogpile days. I agree searxh has come a long way. I’m just saying Google used to be better in that old sweet spot.
Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”
The absolute gall of this woman to blame her own negligence and incompetence on a tool she grossly misused.
And when the search engines shove it in your faces and try to make it so we HAVE to use it for searches to justify their stupid expenses?
Use something else.
This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.
No.
I ask GPT for random junk all the time. If it’s important, I’ll double-check the results. I take any response with a grain of salt, though.
So, if it isn’t important, you just want an answer, and you don’t care whether it’s correct or not?
I use LLMs before search especially when I’m exploring all possibilities, it usually gives me some good leads.
I somehow know when it’s going to be accurate or when it’s going to lie to me and I lean on tools for calculations, being time aware, and web search to help with the lies.
I somehow know when it’s going to be accurate
Are you familiar with Dunning-Kruger?
Sure but you can benchmark accuracy and LLMs are trained on different sets of data using different methods to improve accuracy. This isn’t something you can’t know, and I’m not claiming to know how, I’m saying that with exposure I have gained intuition, and as a result have learned to prompt better.
Ask an LLM to write powershell vs python, it will be more accurate with python. I have learned this through exposure. I’ve used many many LLMs, most are tuned to code.
Currently enjoying llama3.3:70b by the way, you should check it out if you haven’t.
The same can be said about the search results. For search results, you have to use your brain to determine what is correct and what is not. Now imagine for a moment if you were to use those same brain cells to determine if the AI needs a check.
AI is just another way to process the search results, that happens to give you the correct answer up front, most of the time. If you go blindly trust it, that’s on you.
With the search results, you know what the sources are. With AI, you don’t.
If you knew what the sources were, you wouldn’t have needed to search in the first place. Just because it’s on a reputable website does not make it legit. You still have to reason.
You are spending more time and effort doing that than you would googling old fashioned way. And if you don’t check, you might as well throwing magic 8-ball, less damage to the environment, same accuracy
The latest GPT does search the internet to generate a response, so it’s currently a middleman to a search engine.
No it doesn’t. It incorporates unknown number of words from the internet into a machine which only purpose is to sound like a human. It’s an insanely complicated machine, but the truthfulness of the response not only never considered, but also is impossible to take as a deaired result.
And the fact that so many people aren’t equipped to recognise it behind the way it talks could be buffling, but also very consistent with other choices humanity takes regularly.False.
When it’s important you can have an LLM query a search engine and read/summarize the top n results. It’s actually pretty good, it’ll give direct quotes, citations, etc.
And some of those citations and quotes will be completely false and randomly generated, but they will sound very believable, so you don’t know truth from random fiction until you check every single one of them. At which point you should ask yourself why did you add unneccessary step of burning small portion of the rainforest to ask random word generator for stuff, when you could not do that and look for sources directly, saving that much time and energy
As a side note, I feel like this take is intellectually lazy. A knife cannot be used or handled like a spoon because it’s not a spoon. That doesn’t mean the knife is bad, in fact knives are very good, but they do require more attention and care. LLMs are great at cutting through noise to get you closer to what is contextually relevant, but it’s not a search engine so, like with a knife, you have to be keenly aware of the sharp end when you use it.
I, too, get the feeling, that the RoI is not there with LLM. Being able to include “site:” or “ext:” are more efficient.
I just made another test: Kaba, just googling kaba gets you a german wiki article, explaining it means KAkao + BAnana
chatgpt: It is the combination of the first syllables of KAkao and BEutel - Beutel is bag in german.
It just made up the important part. On top of chatgpt says Kaba is a famous product in many countries, I am sure it is not.
I guess it depends on your models and tool chain. I don’t have this issue but I have seen it for sure, in the past with smaller models no tools and legal code.
In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.
LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.
Ok but may I point you to the reality that internet spread misinformation is a critically bad problem at the moment
And your argument is that a human will be better than an AI going through that? Because it seems unrelated to the initial argument.
Biggest reason I stopped using Google
Who else is going to aggregate those recipes for me without having to scroll past ads a personal blog bs?
There was a project a few years back that scrapped and parsed, literally the entire internet, for recipes, and put them in an elasticsearch db. I made a bomb ass rub for a tri-tip and chimichurri with it that people still talk about today. IIRC I just searched all tri-tip rubs and did a tag cloud of most common ingredients and looked at ratios, so in a way it was the most generic or average rub.
If I find the dataset I’ll update, I haven’t been able to find it yet but I’m sure I still have it somewhere.
That’s often what I ask chatgpt for. "For a béarnaise what’s the milk flour ratio? "
I’m a capable chef, I want to get straight to the specifics.
So I rarely splurge on an app but I did splurge on AntList on Android because they have a import recipe function. Also allows you to get paywall blocked recipes if you are fast enough.
spl
People buy apps?
Not LLM, that’s for sure
Tell me you’re not using them without telling me you’re not using them.
Thd fuck do you mean without telling? I am very explicitly telling you that I don’t use them, and I’m very openly telling you that you also shouldn’t
I use them hundreds of times daily. I’m 3-5x more productive thanks to them. I’m incorporating them into the products I’m building to help make others who use the platform more productive.
Why the heck should I not use them? They are an excellent tool for so many tasks, and if you don’t stay on top of their use, in many fields you will fall irrecoverably behind.
Google search results are often completely unrelated so it’s not any better. If the thing I’m looking for is obscure, AI often finds some thread that I can follow, but I always double check that information.
Know your tool limits, after hundreds of prompts I’ve learned pretty well when the AI is spitting bullshit answers. Real people on the internet can be just as wrong and biased, so it’s best to find multiple independent sourcesObvious problem is obvious.
garbage in, garbage out.
Eh…I got it to find a product that met the specs I was looking for on Amazon when no other search worked. It’s certainly a last resort but it worked. Idk why whenever I’m looking to buy anything lately somehow the only criteria I care about are never documented properly…
It’s useful to point you in the right direction, but anything beyond that necessitates more research
I mean, it gave me exactly what I asked for. The only further research was to actually read the item description to verify that but I could have blindly accepted it and received what I was looking for.
Out of curiosity, did it find a source for those specs that wasn’t indexed well elsewhere?
Yea. It was reading the contents of the item description I think. In this instance I was looking for an item with specific dimensions and just searching those didn’t work because Amazon sellers are ass at naming shit and it returned a load of crap. but when I put them in their AI thing it pulled several matches right away.
When search engines stop being shit, I will.
Okay, but what else to do with it?
Then how will I know how many ‘r’ is in Strawberry /s
I’ve used it for very, very specific cases. I’m on Kagi, so it’s a built in feature (that isn’t intrusive), and it typically generates great answers. That is, unless I’m getting into something obscure. I’ve used it less than five times, all in all.
