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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

#171

Post by dfee »

Gigachad wrote: post #132
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.

Your response reminds me of Snowcrash :)

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#172

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

darkerside wrote: post #161
blibble wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humans can only produce semi-convincing bullshit at a limited rate with AI this limit is all but removed all the human generated bullshit ever created will soon be dwarfed by what AI can vomit out in an hour

How do you know that? A human that produced fully convincing bullshit would be definitionally undetectable to you

Because everyone has at least tried to lie - not necessarily for malicious reasons, e.g. white lies - a few times in their lives and know it’s not easy coming up with plausible sounding lies. It takes effort. Sure it might be effortless for some psychopaths but there are a limited number of such people. Overall the internet was surprisingly usable despite all the liars - even now with SEO and content farms; I think even SEOs realize that it’s better to provide information that’s true than lie if it cost them the same.

LLMs changes all that. They can produce content on a massive scale that can drown out everything else. It doesn’t help the fact that more inaccurate LLMs are cheaper and easier to create and run - think about all the ChatGPT3 level LLMs vs ChatGPT4 level LLMs; guess which ones SEOs will gravitate towards.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#173

Post by yellow_postit »

Gigachad wrote: post #132
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.

Discord has raised so much money and is part of the inflated valuation unicorns that I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat get forced into Ads

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#174

Post by arcanemachiner »

lhl wrote: post #134
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.

Finding about about their flat-rate pricing makes it a complete no-brainer for me to switch if I ever hit >100 searches per month (haven't gotten there... Yet).

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#175

Post by jayd16 »

Gigachad wrote: post #132
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.

We could just dump crowd sourcing and go back to well known and reliable sources of journalism.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#176

Post by phil917 »

infoseek12 wrote: post #2

Leaving aside the article to discuss the source for a moment. When did Wired become so antitech? There are good critical viewpoints but most of the articles they are putting out at this point read like bitter diatribes. Which is a shame because they used to be an excellent publication.

I saw a comment describing this increasing luddite response to new tech developments and it resonated with me.

Essentially, the comment made the point that tech is advancing so fast these days that most people are unable to keep up with the pace of these radical changes. And the natural reaction to that for many is to reject these "advancements" or at least look upon them with cynicism and skepticism.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#177

Post by jppittma »

yellow_postit wrote: post #173
Gigachad wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Discord has raised so much money and is part of the inflated valuation unicorns that I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat get forced into Ads

I really like that service. I can't wait to see how they enshittify this one.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#178

Post by yoyohello13 »

lhl wrote: post #134
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.

I actually found my first AI YouTube channel today looking for starfield videos. I noticed the narrator sounded like text-to-speech. I went to the channel and it’s all just random videos for tones of different games with no real theme. Was a surreal experience.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#179

Post by Gigachad »

yellow_postit wrote: post #173
Gigachad wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Discord has raised so much money and is part of the inflated valuation unicorns that I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat get forced into Ads

The point is the user posting isn't able to put their own ads in. So they can't profit by flooding the platform with crap.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#180

Post by Semaphor »

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…

Especially for BG3, most of the content sounds like it’s written by LLMs. Even the parts that are correct and possibly even checked by humans.
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