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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#51

Post by eastbound »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #7
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they do. At least not in a safe way. The AI doesn’t understand meaning or the underlying material and concepts. I’m sure filters will be put into a pipeline but it will never be as good as letting the human sniff out the correct answers.

Today I asked chatGPT what Einstein's favourite food was. It gave a reasonable answer about him liking simple foods. The worrying thing is that I was satisfied with the result. It was plausible. It could well be true. There is a good chance that this kind of AI might provide the right kind of response that a large percentage of the public find convincing enough to not bother with additional research.

The universal truth for people is often different than the truth, and AI has to return the convenient truth.

Example. People are persuaded that women can do two things at the same time and men cannot. Despite countless counterexamples, the original study positioning everyone on a bell curve with only 6% difference in time of execution, and without checking for the quality of the results (“254 plus 786 equals 126 quick mafs!!!”), it is blatantly false, but any search engine that would return that it is false would make itself rejected by humans.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#52

Post by forrestthewoods »

m_mueller wrote: post #40
type4 wrote: post #26

It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that. That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then…

and by extension: the ability and expression of doubt / humility. knowing what you don't know is when you reach a certain maturity, which so far all these AIs seem to lack.

That’s not particularly different from comments on HackerNews and Reddit. There’s a lot of extremely confident and very wrong answers on both sites!

ChatGPT is probably more wrong more often, by a good margin. But I don’t think the argument “it’s confidently wrong” carries any weight. Humans are extremely susceptible to humans who display confidence. It’d probably be a good thing if humans were as skeptical of confident humans as they need to be of confident chat/search bots.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#53

Post by shagie »

lerchmo wrote: post #33
shagie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's chatbots are complex language models based on the language that they were trained on. They are very clever at transforming data into language, or one language into another... but they work on language and not knowledge . It would be interesting to see a language model identify the necessary resources to fulfill a query which is then fed back into it to transform the dry data back into language. Identify if th…

I mean you can give chatgtp API docs and it will write the actual code to find the answers.

Do you trust it to write that bug free?

Where are you putting the API key to access those services?

Where does it run the code that it wrote and how does it provision those resources?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#55

Post by smadge »

type4 wrote: post #26

It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that. That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then…

The problem is that fact checking functionality is a harder NLP/ML problem than bullshit generation.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#56

Post by kmoser »

halukakin wrote: post #10

Today I experienced just the opposite. Chatgpt answered some business questions in less than a minute. I would have spent 30 mins in seo optimized sites to find the exact same info.

It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT is monetized to slip in some paid content, similar to product placement. Until then, I'm sure bright minds are already working on ways to ensure it feeds on data tainted with their own agendas.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#57

Post by enlyth »

userbinator wrote: post #34

They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are turning into AI chatbots too. When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI". Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.

A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots")

I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of more technical search engine for developers and the classic Google experience where some neural network tries to make sense of your poorly written human language phrased question

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#58

Post by permo-w »

dpkirchner wrote: post #48
WJW wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early…

I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are also low scoring.

you could probably ask it

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#59

Post by gvurrdon »

Assuming this refers to https://chat.openai.com/, it's rather difficult to try it out. After creating an account it demanded a phone number. Of course, I will not supply my own, and temporary ones I tried were either recognised as such or rejected has having already been used.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#60

Post by dpkirchner »

megablast wrote: post #13
n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #4

I agree that chat bots aren’t the proper modality for replacing search. So what? Currently, Google search results stink. ChatGPT results are way better in a number of domains. Does it need to be a chat bot? No. But Google still stinks now. I’ll take anything that can just find the correct information.

Google has ruined the web. Look what they did to recipe sites?? Truly awful. And there used to be sites that answered the question on the search page. Google pushed them to the bottom.

I've stopped using unqualified Google searches for recipes. Limiting results to allrecipes.com helps a fair amount (they're a pretty unobnoxious site as things go). It's telling that Google doesn't rank them higher.
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