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Generative AI could make search harder to trust

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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#61

Post by LordDragonfang »

dredmorbius wrote: post #40
BitwiseFool wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#62

Post by ryanklee »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #57
ryanklee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are vastly everestimating how unique this problem of hallucinations is. It seems to me it relies mostly on discounting just how much we've already had to deal with this same problem in humans over the millenia. The problem of proliferation of bad information might be getting worse, but this isn't native to generative AI. The entire informational ecosystem has to deal with this. GPTs compound the issue, but as…

The thing is when you call a human on bullshit, they usually can't back it up well enough to pass the smell test. When you call an AI on bullshit it can instantly fabricate plausible, credible seeming sources/evidence. A human's lie is different than an AI's hallucination, since it's still based on (distorting) the truth, whereas the hallucination is based on an invented reality (yes I know it's applied statistics an…

Intelligent people can fill the void of ignorance with plausible sounding but factually incorrect information. They are apt to engage cognitive biases in such a way that the biases produce assertions that are deeply indistinquishable from factual assertions. They fool themselves in this way and they fool others. This happens all the time.

LLMs are no different in this respect.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#63

Post by icyberbullyu »

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…

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#66

Post by carlosjobim »

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

The shadow libraries.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#67

Post by carlosjobim »

DayDollar wrote: post #25
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

There will be a web of trust, with a valuation of nodes by trustworthyness. And people will get only one id for this. Ones name is ones value and a reputation will be a hard earned thing again.

Isn't this how it has been since the dawn of time?

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#68

Post by meowface »

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've had the exact same experience. That said, when I do add all the right quotes and conditions to the query to filter out the blog/newsspam drivel, I still - usually - eventually - get pretty good results. Sometimes I have to switch to Bing or even Yandex, but it's rare.

Adding "reddit" to queries can be pretty useful. You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game. (Though one big caveat is searching for products/services. Lots of threads full of bot accounts writing "[link] has been the best [thing], in my experience". They're usually easy to spot, but sometimes they do seem pretty natural until you check the post history.)

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#70

Post by bnralt »

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…

Not only that, but you're also left with the issue of parsing what someone else has written. Even when using answers I find from web searches, I often drop results into ChatGPT so I can get a rough idea of what the person is trying to say first, or check if it agrees with my understanding of what's being said.
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