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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

#381

Post by datpiff »

anonytrary wrote: post #325
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…

This is a great way to formulate the difference. In my mind, Google does search, which is not the same as synthesis. ChatGPT is a synthesis engine. I think there is room for engines like ChatGPT to also return links to the training documents that were most relevant to producing an answer. At that point, it would be doing search and synthesis at the same time. I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do t…

> ChatGPT is a synthesis engine

This is exactly what ChatGPT cannot do!

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#382

Post by shaky-carrousel »

lolinder wrote: post #86
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…

Google was not designed to provide accurate results either, and it shows. I can find results to confirm every conspiracy theory I can think of. ChatGPT at least denies conspiracy theories.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#383

Post by summerlight »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #382
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…

Google was not designed to provide accurate results either, and it shows. I can find results to confirm every conspiracy theory I can think of. ChatGPT at least denies conspiracy theories.

In search results, you can at least evaluate how trustful the document is, based on various factors. This resembles how academia has evolved: you can dig into all the references, see the author's publication history and even their reputation. How would you do this with ChatGPT? We can't even verify the sources of its claim and it sometimes even makes up non-existent references in a very confident tone.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#384

Post by amelius »

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…

> This is my point: ChatGPT was trained to produce text, not to produce facts.

That's only because it was trained on non-facts also.

But that holds for Google Search just as well ...

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#385

Post by lancesells »

amelius wrote: post #384
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…

> This is my point: ChatGPT was trained to produce text, not to produce facts. That's only because it was trained on non-facts also. But that holds for Google Search just as well ...

I think there's a difference in presentation.

Google Search gives you links to content that might have the answer (excluding their own box). You can see the differences between the authors of said content.

ChatGPT gives you content that looks like the answer. You can't see the authors of the generated content.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#386

Post by amelius »

lancesells wrote: post #385
amelius wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is my point: ChatGPT was trained to produce text, not to produce facts. That's only because it was trained on non-facts also. But that holds for Google Search just as well ...

I think there's a difference in presentation. Google Search gives you links to content that might have the answer (excluding their own box). You can see the differences between the authors of said content. ChatGPT gives you content that looks like the answer. You can't see the authors of the generated content.

Do you think that ChatGPT can't be trained to output links to sources?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#387

Post by brookst »

doliveira wrote: post #136
brookst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster, not to mention amoral.

Disinformation is moral when created by people, because it costs more?

I’m new to this idea that something can be acceptable when done by people but unacceptable when automated. I don’t really see it.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#388

Post by turmeric_root »

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.

The GPT-3 playground lets you view the probabilities of generated tokens. That's the closest thing to a confidence score you can get from a transformer model. But like the other person said, this isn't very meaningful.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#389

Post by turmeric_root »

smadge wrote: post #55
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.

Psh, all we need to do is create an AI that tells whether or not a single sentence is true or not. Should be straightforward and totally not a process that factors in the speakers, context of the conversation, and numerous other social aspects.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#390

Post by anotheryou »

they totally are, not 100 percent but mostlz working already. risks of misinfomation will further plummet, and in already living with it for eg programming questions

this bot even references sources, that's where it should go: https://you.com/search?q=what+was+the+recent+breakthrough+in...

ask "source pls" if it doesnt give you one

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