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

The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–68 of 68 posts

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#61

Post by Thorentis »

mrtksn wrote: post #55
hrunt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary thing about this reply is I cannot tell whether it was written by a human or by Bing trying to gaslight me into believing that factual correctness is not important. It reads just like Bing trying to explain why the year is 2022 or Bing did not say that it said the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The scary part is that people can start dismissing the opinions that they don't agree as "AI generated".

There is a hilarious irony to this. In all the classic scifi, an opinion is usually trusted because it came from AI, though often as things progress the AI is eventually distrusted. Have we managed to side step this entire thing be ruining humanity's perception of AI with ChatGPT and Bing?

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#62

Post by Thorentis »

mrtksn wrote: post #28
Thorentis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT is very effective Massive [Citation Needed] to be honest. ChatGPT is arguably even worse than Bing at producing factually correct information, since it does not have any ability to source it. It simply predicts the next most likely word in a sentence. Even if that next word makes the entire thing horribly incorrect.

Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it. ChatGPT is very effective because it acts as an advisor in any topic. Sometimes its very wrong but it gives you an overall picture of the thing you are looking for and from there you can drill down. It is much better than trying to drill down from spam ridden ad infested results Google would provide. Once you pass the very basic stuff, you are oft…

People overstate how bad Google results are. The great thing about blogspam and ads is that you have an extra signal for what to instantly dismiss. I have gotten very good at filtering out Google results, not based on the information they contained, but how they were presented, etc. With ChatGPT, you don't get this. You only get a blob of text that looks identical to every other correct or incorrect response. There is no extra signal.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#63

Post by askvictor »

woefblaf123 wrote: post #27
askvictor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried DDG for a bit and was constantly being fed blog articles and 'developer websites' instead of canonical documentation for queries that I would have thought would go straight to (say) the main Python docs site. So I moved back to Google. Now Google does exactly the same thing. Time to try moving again I guess. (Also, ads? What ads? Doesn't everyone use an adblocker?)

I use an adblocker of course, but Google's top results are basically paid ads. An adblocker doesn't block them because they come from google themselves. You can just pay google to be on the top for certain search terms, regardless of the actual relevance of your website. So I'm calling them ads, but they are technically paid searh results. Indeed DDG is also pretty bad lately but I still consider it better than Googl…

Are you saying that the top results in Google are paid results even then they don't have any markings/boxes/disclaimers indicating this is the case? I mean nothing surprises me anymore, but you'd at least imagine various regulators wouldn't be too happy about that.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#64

Post by wkat4242 »

askvictor wrote: post #63
woefblaf123 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use an adblocker of course, but Google's top results are basically paid ads. An adblocker doesn't block them because they come from google themselves. You can just pay google to be on the top for certain search terms, regardless of the actual relevance of your website. So I'm calling them ads, but they are technically paid searh results. Indeed DDG is also pretty bad lately but I still consider it better than Googl…

Are you saying that the top results in Google are paid results even then they don't have any markings/boxes/disclaimers indicating this is the case? I mean nothing surprises me anymore, but you'd at least imagine various regulators wouldn't be too happy about that.

Thay have a really small text saying "Ad"

https://ads.google.com/intl/en_id/home/resources/what-is-pai...

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#65

Post by askvictor »

wkat4242 wrote: post #64
askvictor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the top results in Google are paid results even then they don't have any markings/boxes/disclaimers indicating this is the case? I mean nothing surprises me anymore, but you'd at least imagine various regulators wouldn't be too happy about that.

Thay have a really small text saying "Ad" https://ads.google.com/intl/en_id/home/resources/what-is-pai...

Funnily enough, my adblocker blocks this page. In any case, the adblocker(s) I use (ublock origin in browser, pihole on the network) seem to block Google ads/paid search results. It does still clearly seem to be their policy to label all paid search results:

| This is a search result, not an ad. Only ads are paid, and they'll always be labelled with 'Sponsored' or 'Ad'.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#66

Post by mrtksn »

Thorentis wrote: post #61
mrtksn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary part is that people can start dismissing the opinions that they don't agree as "AI generated".

There is a hilarious irony to this. In all the classic scifi, an opinion is usually trusted because it came from AI, though often as things progress the AI is eventually distrusted. Have we managed to side step this entire thing be ruining humanity's perception of AI with ChatGPT and Bing?

I think the problem is not that it's written by AI but written by AI to serve some people's interests. Therefore it's not organic due to the intent but it could have been organic if it was written by AI serving its own interests.

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#67

Post by flangola7 »

jamesredd wrote: post #12
flangola7 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to make it more effective. Insulting users is not desired program behavior.

Unless the users want to be insulted.

I have large doubts about that being Microsoft's intentions

Re: The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

#68

Post by apple4ever »

wkat4242 wrote: post #3

Bing Search is actually not bad if you use it through duckduckgo. It has much less ads than Google and seems to deliver better search results on the first page (mainly because Google's results are now mostly paid ads, not real results) But I'd never use it directly. Before I'll even try their new chatbot someone will have to offer a privacy condom service for it like what duckduckgo does for search. Always use protec…

Does it not have the problem where on searches you go to the next pages and it's the same result over and over again over and over again over and over again
Post reply on HN