Surely, just as content farms have gradually trashed the quality of search results on major platforms. There's also an over-reliance on raw quantities; I often get irrelevant and unwanted news articles from India simply because the huge population of that country coupled with widespread use of English outweighs US content on the social graph.
Generative AI could make search harder to trust
151–160 of 255 posts
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#152I 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?
GP is literally reminding you of a time when online misinformation was rampant, but before search engines (temporarily) did a better job than overwhelmed curators.
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#153I 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…
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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#154Earlier 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…
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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not easy for a regular person to obtain access to a .edu webpage.
A "regular person" can: - Enroll or be hired at an eligible institution. There are literally thousands of these. - Bribe or compromise someone enrolled or hired at an eligible institution. - Create a de novo eligible institution. For-profit colleges are not uncommon. Someone motivated by profit or advantage would likely find virtually any of these options quite straightforward. I'm ... somewhat pained that this needs…
> Enroll or be hired at an eligible institution. There are literally thousands of these
You don’t generally get the kind of personal website being discussed to my understanding.
> Bribe or compromise someone enrolled or hired at an eligible institution
Finding a professor willing to stake their job and reputation for such a blatantly immoral scam seems hard.
> Create a de novo eligible institution
Is it actually easy for a regular person to create their own college?
I find the snarky finish to your comment obnoxious.
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#156I 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?
Because hiring humans to write misinformation costs more money than $20/mo? Like what are you even trying to say?
Before LLMs, a $3000 camera had fake reviews on Amazon, and you got fake news about politicians. But you can safely assume "bg3 silver ingot" information is likely real, since hiring someone to make up silver ignot will never make the money back.
No any more.
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Reddit never had experts. Maybe for half a minute. It became an echo chamber fast: fake internet points to be gained for saying what got upvoted last week, or to be lost for saying anything different.
Reddit may not have experts per set, but in the right subreddits it definitely has enthusiasts. In ages gone by, you'd find the same people on message boards or forums, talking up and comparing the minute details of this or that. There's obviously the same risk of cargo culting that there's always been, but there's genuinely useful information available from people who spend way more time than the common man on their area of interest.
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Reddit never had experts. Maybe for half a minute. It became an echo chamber fast: fake internet points to be gained for saying what got upvoted last week, or to be lost for saying anything different.
Some subreddits at (like askscience) at least asked for a copy of your diploma (in a science field) if you wanted flair. It was actually an awesome reddit.
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#159As opposed to today where half my search results are the result of who has the larger SEO budget?
Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Reddit never had experts. Maybe for half a minute. It became an echo chamber fast: fake internet points to be gained for saying what got upvoted last week, or to be lost for saying anything different.
Two things can be true at the same time: "Reddit is prone to karma-driven bullshittery" and "Reddit content is generally significantly higher-quality than SEO content farms".
With Reddit you might get inane arguments and bandwagoning about what the best game strategy is, but you're exceedingly unlikely to read about a game mechanic that was straight-up hallucinated by a LLM.