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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

#251

Post by hasmanean »

solarkraft wrote: post #132
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe this to be a huge deal. In no time a huge part of the internet will be AI-generated and we will pollute our data set for research and training AI with things that are subtly or completely false at times and we won't be able to tell. It's a lot like iRobot or other stories in which the robots will start to subtly misbehave, like a program you can't debug.

Well this is unfair because we haven’t given natural intelligence a chance yet.

What if we invented an algebraic notation for search indexing and allowed people to index and classify documents in their own way. Then a search engine could do something special with all that.

Human intelligence cannot progress without a notation to capture our thoughts in.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#253

Post by shellfishgene »

blondin wrote: post #191
marginalia_nu wrote: post #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 jus…

my bet is on chatbots replacing Google Search and other search engines. people will stop tolerating their shenanigans. i have, myself, seen what is possible. and i am not setting that bar low ever again. the other time, ChatGPT taught me, right in the chat, about a CSS animation feature i didn't know about. with full example code. i proceeded to ask a trick question. i knew where to go for more in-depth information b…

From all we've learned in the last decades the best way to make money on their AI assistant for a company will be too allow advertisers to pay for being preferred in the AI's answers. ChatGPT is a beta experiment and very neutral it seems, but considering the cost to run it there is no way it will stay like that.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#254

Post by wombatpm »

RBerenguel wrote: post #63
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…

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.

Or you could be getting Calvin’s dad kind of answers:

Calvin:how do they know the weight limit for a bridge?

Dad: they drive bigger and bigger trucks over it until it collapses, then they rebuild the bridge and put up the sign

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#255

Post by bandrami »

lolinder wrote: post #240
darepublic wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT in its current form can't replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there. Why can't it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation? It can include footnotes for various passages of it's answer to indicate ambiguity, varying levels of confidence, etc.

For the same reason why it might produce a bogus answer: it's a language model, not a general AI. Prompt it for footnotes and it will generate footnotes for books that don't exist or that don't actually contain the citation. They'll match the form of a footnote, because that's what the model was trained to do, but the citations won't resolve. For example, I asked who the first president of Argentina was. It gave the…

OTOH I could imagine a hybrid situation where the AI Bot searches Google for you and restates the millions of results Google gives it

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#256

Post by smiley1437 »

echelon wrote: post #104
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are early days. Everything is going to move faster than you can keep up. You'll see head-turning headlines on a daily basis. Next year will see AI begin to disrupt so many businesses you'd thought were absolutely impenetrable. I don't think anything is safe anymore. By the end of the decade, I think even manufacturing and robotics will be automated. Everyone from McDonalds to Apple and Ford will feel the pressu…

>If ever there was a cue for a career change or opportunity to make a whole lot of money, it's this. Don't ignore this one! You're still early enough to take advantage.

Any suggestions on how to take advantage?

Dive into ML development?

Learn how to write prompts for AI engines?

Invest in AI companies? Sadly OpenAI is private, but Microsoft is a monetizing partner I guess (Copilot)

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#257

Post by elicksaur »

joe_the_user wrote: post #234
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely this. I just did a discussion with ChatGPT on intuitionistic logic and it gave answers that were subtly wrong in my understanding of the subject. I have an MA in math but I couldn't be sure whether my impression of its wrongness was correct until asked it for a reference and it gave a nonexistent book by Per Martin-Lof, "Intuitionistic Logic", along with a list of actual books by him. It's an impressive an…

No, you are probably right. It has no guardrails for generating a true citation. When you ask it for citations, its programming generates the form of citation. As the authors of the article discuss, it has no model of reality to understand that citations are not just a form of words and symbols put together.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#258

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

bandrami wrote: post #255
lolinder wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason why it might produce a bogus answer: it's a language model, not a general AI. Prompt it for footnotes and it will generate footnotes for books that don't exist or that don't actually contain the citation. They'll match the form of a footnote, because that's what the model was trained to do, but the citations won't resolve. For example, I asked who the first president of Argentina was. It gave the…

OTOH I could imagine a hybrid situation where the AI Bot searches Google for you and restates the millions of results Google gives it

This was my immediate thought as well. I don’t need millions of searches done, I need 20, then a language model to look through them and collect text that helps me find what I’m looking for.

The lucky thing for Google if they got it working, is they are half there already. As much as I despise Google, I have to admit GPT won’t be their death.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#260

Post by lolinder »

bandrami wrote: post #255
lolinder wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason why it might produce a bogus answer: it's a language model, not a general AI. Prompt it for footnotes and it will generate footnotes for books that don't exist or that don't actually contain the citation. They'll match the form of a footnote, because that's what the model was trained to do, but the citations won't resolve. For example, I asked who the first president of Argentina was. It gave the…

OTOH I could imagine a hybrid situation where the AI Bot searches Google for you and restates the millions of results Google gives it

I agree that a hybrid could work, although ChatGPT struggles to keep context with more than a dozen paragraphs, so I doubt it could summarize millions of results.

And in either case, you're not solving the problem that commenters here are trying to solve: Google's bad results will still affect your search, so ChatGPT will be fed largely by dubious blogspam.

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