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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

#131

Post by ryanklee »

cleandreams wrote: post #109
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…

Uh, no. Generative AI does not have a standard of truth. It generates text according to the probabilities given what it learned from its data set. There is no systematic modelling of a world that it can test its assertions against. What are called hallucinations are a fundamental property of the approach. The hallucinations are probable -- just not true. The model has succeeded but the assertions are false. This has…

> the human method results in fewer routine hallucinations.

I'd love you to produce data to back this up.

My guess is that you are wrong, on the basis of how often I discover that I'm full of shit and how often I discover other people are full of shit.

Humans are built for being wrong just as much as being right. We wouldn't have such complicated institutions and social structures built around controlling for those symmetric capacities if it weren't the case.

Even then, we find ourselves surrounded and overcome by falsehoods of our own design.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#132

Post by Gigachad »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #127

I actually experienced this the other day. Bought the new Baldur's Gate and was wondering what items to keep or sell (don't judge me, I'm a pack rat in games!) I had found some silver ingots. The top search result for "bg3 silver ingot" is a content farm article that very confidently claims you can use them at a workbench in Act 3 to upgrade your weapons. Except this is a complete fabrication: silver ingots exist onl…

Probably in the future people will only trust sources of info that can't be monatised. If you want to know the answer to a game question you just got to the reddit or discord and ask, since there is no point autogenerating crap for discord when you can't put ads next to it and the mods can remove you.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#133

Post by crakenzak »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #127

I actually experienced this the other day. Bought the new Baldur's Gate and was wondering what items to keep or sell (don't judge me, I'm a pack rat in games!) I had found some silver ingots. The top search result for "bg3 silver ingot" is a content farm article that very confidently claims you can use them at a workbench in Act 3 to upgrade your weapons. Except this is a complete fabrication: silver ingots exist onl…

> If it's 2023 and on, I dust off my 90's "everything on the World Wide Web is wrong" glasses.

because misinformation written by humans didn’t exist before LLMs?

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#134

Post by lhl »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #127

I actually experienced this the other day. Bought the new Baldur's Gate and was wondering what items to keep or sell (don't judge me, I'm a pack rat in games!) I had found some silver ingots. The top search result for "bg3 silver ingot" is a content farm article that very confidently claims you can use them at a workbench in Act 3 to upgrade your weapons. Except this is a complete fabrication: silver ingots exist onl…

I had a similar experience recently looking some stuff for Starfield. Content farms are obviously switching to LLM-generated (mostly hallucinated) articles and Google seems to be ranking them pretty highly atm.

Kagi's ability to manually downrank/remove those kinds of results from your searches (and their return to flat rate pricing) finally tipped the scales for me for subscribing/switching search.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#135

Post by TeMPOraL »

zpeti wrote: post #71

Here's what people don't understand: this is mostly good for google. The worse organic results are, the more people will click on paid links. This is WHY everyone on HN is complaining about search results, because google doesn't really have an incentive to give you really good results. They only need to be good enough to keep 95% of the population still using google, but mostly expecting the good results to be ads. G…

Huh. How long until they simply change the label from "ad" to "verified"?

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#136

Post by serf »

I think it'd be kind of neat in a backward way if we went back to the 'specialized encyclopedia' days of the 90s.

Web directories , 'Who's Who in Engineering' type lists, etc.

It's a step back from universal search engines being able to find stuff, but it's a step forward with regards to curation and quality of results; so i'm not sure if it's entirely a downgrade.

The early 90s 'website phonebook' type encyclopedias were interesting[0], but I always had to remind my mom "No, this isn't the entire internet, it's just a bunch of places that people like; the secret ones are 'unlisted'."

Note: I never say this is better than a search engine, it's just an interesting end-result after search engines got polluted and modified til the point of uselessness that we're at now with Google.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Directory-Guide-Usenet-Bitne...

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#137

Post by coldbrewed »

crakenzak wrote: post #133
StableAlkyne wrote: post #127

I actually experienced this the other day. Bought the new Baldur's Gate and was wondering what items to keep or sell (don't judge me, I'm a pack rat in games!) I had found some silver ingots. The top search result for "bg3 silver ingot" is a content farm article that very confidently claims you can use them at a workbench in Act 3 to upgrade your weapons. Except this is a complete fabrication: silver ingots exist onl…

> If it's 2023 and on, I dust off my 90's "everything on the World Wide Web is wrong" glasses. because misinformation written by humans didn’t exist before LLMs?

Prior to LLMs, generating plausible-sounding misinformation took actual effort - not much effort, but the marginal cost was reasonably above free. With LLMs making the cost of bullshit vanishingly close to free we're going to tip into an era where uncurated LLM confabulation is going to dominate free information.

There's "one loony had a blog" levels of wrong, and then there's "industrial scale bullshit" levels of wrong and we are not prepared for the latter.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#138

Post by ryanklee »

mvdtnz wrote: post #125
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…

Not one single solitary soul has ever made the claim that misinformation didn't exist before AI so it's not clear who you're arguing with. People are rightly concerned about the scale of misinformation that AI is unlocking.

I didn't say that they did.

What I'm responding to is the strong tendency to discount our very long history of dealing with factually incorrect information and the ascertainment of truth from sources both dubious and trustworthy.

Entire institutions are set up in order to handle these very real problems, the set of which currently dwarfs the problem of hallucinations in GPT.

From a social perspective, non-GPT falsehoods are even more insidious, because we are inclined to trust and believe those whom we like and are like us.

Again, people are in the habit of discounting just how much we are wrong in our everyday lives. The hallucinations therefore appear more singular than they actually are.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#139

Post by civilitty »

beebeepka wrote: post #124
robinsonb5 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect in the coming years the Wayback Machine at archive.org will become ever more important - always assuming it's not lost as collateral damage in their copyright battles. Indexing that dataset and making it searchable would massively increase its value. My inner conspiracy theorist can't help wonder if the continued reduction in search usefulness isn't part of an ongoing deliberate disempowerment of everyday p…

Generative Wayback Machine

That would be the best thing ever. Just ask GPT to hallucinate an entire page based solely off the URL when it doesn’t exist in the database.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#140

Post by StableAlkyne »

crakenzak wrote: post #133
StableAlkyne wrote: post #127

I actually experienced this the other day. Bought the new Baldur's Gate and was wondering what items to keep or sell (don't judge me, I'm a pack rat in games!) I had found some silver ingots. The top search result for "bg3 silver ingot" is a content farm article that very confidently claims you can use them at a workbench in Act 3 to upgrade your weapons. Except this is a complete fabrication: silver ingots exist onl…

> If it's 2023 and on, I dust off my 90's "everything on the World Wide Web is wrong" glasses. because misinformation written by humans didn’t exist before LLMs?

Back in the 90s when the Internet became a thing, it was common knowledge that because normal people made websites, that you should take things with a grain of salt. There was a bit of an overreaction to this, as the general feeling at the time was to trust nothing on the Internet.

In the 00s and 10s, the quality of discoverable content improved: reddit and stackechange had experts (at a higher rate than the rest of the net at least). It was the era where search was good, Google wasn't evil (good results that separated the ads are entirely why they won against AskJeeves and Yahoo), and SEO was still gestating in Adam Smith's wastebasket.

Now Google and Bing are polluted with SEO-optimized content farms designed to waste your time and show you as many ads as possible. They hunger for new content (for the SEO gods demand regular posts), and the cheapest way to do this is an underpaid "author" spewing out a GPT-created firehose of content.

SEO has ruined search, and content farms have made what few usable results there are even less trustworthy.

So yes, the Internet has fundamentally changed in the last 9 months.

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