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Generative AI could make search harder to trust

wired.com

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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#31

Post by abruzzi »

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with:

>Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results.

Web search has, for me, become a nasty twisted hall of mirrors well before generative AI. I almose never get fed relevant results, I alsmost always have to go back and quote all my search terms because the search engine decided it didn't really need to use all of them (usually just one.) The only difference is the poison was human generated. generative AI will simply erase the 5% of results that might give me an answer quickly.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#32

Post by euroderf »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #26

And entropy rises... people thought AI will kill us with machine guns. AI will kill us by making us super stupid...

I have already externalized my to-do lists and other reminder lists to teh interwebz. I can't wait to outsource my faculties for reasoning too.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#33

Post by BitwiseFool »

pseudosavant wrote: post #12

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contaminated' with LLM stuff, but it'll be everywhere after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#34

Post by floren »

RandomWorker wrote: post #16
pseudosavant wrote: post #12

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contaminated' with LLM stuff, but it'll be everywhere after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

My sense is to avoid this have a personal blog. That being said how many people write blogs with grammerly or chatgpt these days. The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. My sense is that you use this technology you might be happy with the results at first but on later review you just notice something off in some sentences and maybe it…

I have definitely read "blogs" written by stitching together LLM outputs. For years people were advised that a technical blog "looks good on a resume" so we saw lots of lightly rewritten Stackoverflow content. Now it's gotten easier.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#35

Post by jfengel »

abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me.

I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site.

When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up.

The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange article with the right answer.

From what I see, certain domains seem to be targeted for exploitation. Programming questions seem to be high up on the list. I wonder if that skews HN readers' perceptions.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#37

Post by faizshah »

I started to go down a line of thinking where I think we might see a return to books in the next 3-5 years. The reason is that with a book it’s a big collection of knowledge and people can post reviews about the quality of the book whereas on the web you have no way of knowing what quality of an article will be anymore.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#39

Post by heavyset_go »

abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

Sounds like a success if that means people see more ads while trying to find what they actually searched for.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#40

Post by dredmorbius »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #33
pseudosavant wrote: post #12

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contaminated' with LLM stuff, but it'll be everywhere after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate.

At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine.

Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.

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