Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

iai.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 415 posts

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#91

Post by seydor »

mc32 wrote: post #32

The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on eggshells. It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious. If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me gove…

i imagine openAI will do anything to keep it public for now. But i wouldn't pay for a version that is basically crippled to kindergarten level

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#93

Post by seydor »

kyleyeats wrote: post #67
asimjalis wrote: post #38

Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT. Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.

"Have you tried Bing? It's great for questions like this."

I would switch to bing if it was powered by this LLM

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#94

Post by oefnak »

TOMDM wrote: post #44

Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11. Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless. I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound. For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive wit…

I wanted to convert a string to be used in an URL.

I gave him the source string, the target string (spaces replaced by %20).

It told me it was called URL encoding and gave me the code to do it.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#95

Post by oefnak »

asimjalis wrote: post #38

Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT. Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.

I will easily pay 20$ a month for a (personalized) ai at the level of ChatGPT.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#96

Post by ThalesX »

bombcar wrote: post #21
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.

How do you verify that chatgpt answers are correct? (And to be honest, how do you gauge the correctness of random internet sites)?

I've used to help me come up with some reasonable points for my business website and then expand those. I verify it with my own thinking.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#97

Post by TOMDM »

oefnak wrote: post #94
TOMDM wrote: post #44

Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11. Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless. I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound. For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive wit…

I wanted to convert a string to be used in an URL. I gave him the source string, the target string (spaces replaced by %20). It told me it was called URL encoding and gave me the code to do it.

Another great example.

I'm sure most people who have messed with APIs long enough could have told you that, but it's an annoying thing to learn the first time if you don't have someone to talk to.

To me chatgpt is that over confident friend you can talk a problem through with, except they've used every language and library under the sun.

It's like speaking to someone who is an amateur at _everything_ but a little too confident.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#98

Post by layer8 »

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…

> There’s a lot of extremely confident and very wrong answers on both sites!

Yeah, but you get to look at a multitude of them, at the context, at replies, at the websites they link to, and can form your own opinion. ChatGPT isn’t able to do that work for you.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#99

Post by asimpletune »

I think this article misses the point. I don’t imagine ChatGPT as is to be a replacement for a search engine. I do however see the interface of talking to an AI in a REPL sort of way, where the context is carried through the conversation as a massive improvement with tons of potential that is yet to be realized.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#100

Post by sitkack »

boredemployee wrote: post #76
RBerenguel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you have asked correctly (or not, that's hard to tell from the onset) and has given you a non-factual answer. For example, I asked ChatGPT for what would be the best introductory book for a subject (added some more conditions to make it pretty clear-cut). It recommended me a book that sounded reasonable in title, with existing authors in the field… but the book didn't exist, at all.

Yes. It can even give name of research papers that never existed

Research papers that probably should exist given the graph of knowledge that it has. I spent about 15 minutes searching for a non-existent paper (I knew this was probably the case when I started, by choice, by choice) and it turns out the title was a mashup of two other papers in the domain.

Same error a human might make if they read too many papers too quickly. Or went to a film festival and was asked to describe the plot(s) of the movies they watched.

Post reply on HN