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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

#161
I think AI chatbots will replace some of the use cases for search engines, but I also think that is a good thing. It will let search engines do what they do even better. Search engines right now do a lot of things, arguably a bit too many, which has the actual search-aspect suffer a bit.

A significant design obstacle with almost all search engines is that it's not entirely clear what you can do with them. They're just a search box, after all. You need either external training or a trial-and-error loop to figure out what you can do with them. This also means that if you change how they work, users get confused because their queries no longer give them what they expect (this is likely a big contributor to the "google is broken"-sentiment that's been going around).

This becomes a problem when the search engine caters to too many modalities of search, as there's an element of guesswork what the user want. Two users may even enter the same query, but look for different results. If I enter the name of a video game, do I want to buy it, or do I want information about it, or maybe fanfiction or something other than the game that shares the same name? Who the heck knows.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#162
post #156
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…

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents Not yet. Today, ChatGPT is bad with facts. Don't rely on what it tells you. But that appears to be the future. And it sounds great.

In my specific specialty - AWS - I asked it a lot of questions like I would at an interview and it answered the questions well enough that I would have passed a candidate who gave me the same answers.

I didn’t just ask definitions. I asked your standard compare and contrast, why would you use, is X and appropriate use of Y, etc.

It can also write Python code, modify existing code based on plain English sentences and do passable code reviews when I asked it “how would you improve this code” when I gave it a 200 line script I wrote.

Then I asked it to make the changes it suggested like unhardcode some values, add exception handling, test for existence of a property it was trying to access.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#163
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…

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#165

I tried baking cookies based on a chatGPT recipe… everything looked right glancing at the response so I dove in and started making them. About 2/3rds the way through it became obvious the steps were correct-looking gibberish.

https://xkcd.com/720/

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#167

I tried baking cookies based on a chatGPT recipe… everything looked right glancing at the response so I dove in and started making them. About 2/3rds the way through it became obvious the steps were correct-looking gibberish.

No shit. Why are you surprised by this? There is no right way to make cookies. This isn't what GPT does.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

I don't know if this is feasible or not, but having the chat bot also be able to respond with a subset of sources that it based its answer on would be a satisfying combination of both worlds I think.

I would be really curious to see how trying to learn a new subject via a chatbot that is able to also provide source material links would go.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#169
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…

Mute the bark? I've never heard this. Yeah GPT didn't know what draxxed and sclounsed means, but I wouldn't expect it to.
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