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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

#81

Post by notwokeno »

forrest2 wrote: post #65
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

There is flywheel issue with generative search: content producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get paid. People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages are already not appreciated by indexed websites. If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will eventuall…

People are going to continue to write books and documentation because AI don't replace those (new software won't be explained by AI so it needs documentation and AI hallucinates anyway so you still have to check it. Books are similar but more extreme.)

People will also continue to chat with each other in eg IRC because human connection is pleasant on a metaphysical level (AI cannot replace this) so you'll always have that as a data source.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#82

Post by jug »

Geee wrote: post #79

For me, ChatGPT has already replaced Google for most queries, so the point is moot. Even if ChatGPT is flawed, it's still way better than Google. Using Google feels stupid; trying different search terms and clicking through dozens of websites with cookie popups and skimming all the bloated content for an answer which might be close to something you're looking for. ChatGPT gives the answer instantly. I don't believe t…

Exactly. These arguments forget how Google is flawed for large swathes of queries due to websites since a long time ago having figured out the algorithm and now game it, while Google doesn't care enough or have the expertise to solve it. Or maybe I should phrase this reply "15 Ways How Google Doesn't Cut It In 2023" so Google can index it...

We can't compare it to some sort of rose glasses view of Google of 2003, but need to compare it to the crappy stale twenty years older engine where you can really only hope the ten first results are OK or otherwise you're out of hope and need to try something else.

Sure, ChatGPT isn't perfect but it has a unique ability to answer me about queries that have not yet been asked or archived. That is a crazy advantage, to be able to assemble responses via a neural network.

ChatGPT needs one more thing though: An indicator of how certain it is of the answer. It's OK to tell us if you're unsure. In fact, it's a problem if it can't.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#85

Post by fragmede »

WJW wrote: post #41
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

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…

To take your parenthetical further, I'm sure they'll get to that. It was only 5 years ago that searching Google for "how old is the Earth" said 6000 years because only the young Earth creationists put such a huge stake into SEO for their pages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/70mdfj/recently_go...

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#86

Post by lolinder »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth.

This doesn't mean that it can't produce accurate facts, most of the time it does! But when it does produce nonsense, it does it in exactly the same tone of authority, so if you don't already know the answer you may well walk away believing an AI hallucination.

And the trouble is it doesn't really matter if everyone here thinks "well, I would follow up each request with research to verify the answer", because most people won't! This is like the Google answer extracts, which fairly frequently mislead by extracting out-of-context quotes, except that there's no way to get the original context and there may in fact be no original context! This makes follow-up research much more complicated than with Google and therefore unlikely to happen. If ChatGPT replaces Google, the amount of nonsense on the internet will get even worse, which is something that until 2022 I never thought was possible.

[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments/blob/master/e...

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#87

Post by brookst »

EGreg wrote: post #69
forrest2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is flywheel issue with generative search: content producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get paid. People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages are already not appreciated by indexed websites. If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will eventuall…

Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by believable content generated by swarms of internet bots. Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running for president. Nevermind that he wasn’t born in the USA… somehow mysterio…

What’s different about AI? People are cheap. Anyone who wants to do this can already do it just with mechanical Turk or just hiring writers in low income countries.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#88

Post by m_mueller »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #52
m_mueller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 confid…

But I’d say at least readers of a random HN comment are naturally skeptic of it. Are ChatGPT users on average having the same stance? My worry is when these tools get just good enough such that due diligence is dropped out of convenience.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#89

Post by 734129837261 »

I compare it all to using Github Copilot in my daily work. Before, I needed to Google many problems to find answers, curate the answers, scroll down websites, read downvoted comments on StackOverflow, copy/paste code, refactor it, turn code into TypeScript, etc.

Now, I just tell Copilot what I need to do, and I simply curate multiple solutions.

ChatGPT also understands what I need to do and changes things based on human instructions. It gets things right much more quickly.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#90

Post by layer8 »

WJW wrote: post #41
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

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…

It tried to convince me that one event can happen before another event even if the time of the event is after the time of the other event. It had a notion that events happen in some order, and that time is ordered, and that events are associated with times, but not that the two orders need to be consistent. And I wasn’t able to convince it otherwise.
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