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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

#191

Post by badwolf »

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 this exact experience, with this same question, and saw that same bullshit "article." Truly frustrating all around.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#192

Post by visarga »

Agree2468 wrote: post #99
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

Right now is best time to buy encyclopedias.

Why, you can dl any version of wikipedia from before 2023

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#193

Post by visarga »

notabee wrote: post #59
salynchnew wrote: post #4

Recently an article came out where someone said that the company I work for is a big user of WebAssembly, but the reality is that we don't use it. After finding the contributed article (on a well-known news site, not Wired though), it looks like a tech founder might've been using ChatGPT to write an article about the uses for WASM. The arguments were generally sound, but I don't think that anyone did the work to manu…

This is kind of like the advent of spellcheck, where a whole class of errors started to appear regularly in almost every article because publishers stopped paying for the human labor to manually review for things like homonym or word ordering errors. Except much worse, because it could allow spurious or even harmful facts to accrue and spread instead of just grammatical mistakes.

> Except much worse, because it could allow spurious or even harmful facts to accrue

It already did, even in the "purely human" era. I think LLM text will gradually become more trustworthy than a random website by consistency filtering the training set.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#194

Post by daniel_iversen »

At first I thought the article was going to be about human-led misinformation but I wonder whether with both hallucinations and human-fed misinformation (AI-helped or not!) whether we can use AI to fact/self check results (both AI generated and human ones) and prompt us about potential misinformation and link to relevant sources? That way AI could actually help solve the trust issue.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#195

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Platforms will be happy to run bots they can portray as real humans to bolster engagement, make spaces seem popular and dynamic, trick advertisers and investors, etc.

Similarly, if it costs basically nothing to work your way into communities to astroturf with bots, it'll happen. You don't have to post about great sites to get free Viagra right away, you can build reputation and subtly astroturf. And you can use additional bots to build/portray consensus.

Reddit is already a problem because of actual humans doing the latter. It'll just get worse when it's automated further.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#196

Post by frabcus »

klyrs wrote: post #74
faizshah wrote: post #37

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.

Only, amazon is now flooded with crapbooks written by artificial psychonauts and also reviews written by artificial psychonauts.

Yeah - I think books from non-Amazon publishers is probably the filter to use

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#198

Post by hypnoosi »

It's great to hear that someone finds Replit's AI capabilities useful for accelerating their learning... However, I must point out that the post sounds like an advertisement for an overpriced product. Not poking the AI assistance in coding, it definitely can be valuable, but the effectiveness vs. cost-efficiency varies. 20 dollars per month for coding a chatbot, not worth it for me...

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#199

Post by im3w1l »

Gigachad wrote: post #179
yellow_postit wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are quite a few people that use reddit to market their onlyfans.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#200

Post by 15457345234 »

phil917 wrote: post #176
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.

I don't think it's anything to do with the pace of advancement, it's more that many many of these 'advancements' look very obviously harmful, not 'potentially' harmful but actively and immediately harmful in the manner of a car with brakes that only work 90% of the time.
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