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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

#221

Post by ben_w »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #10

More amusing and frightening is when people search about themselves and turn up AI generated crap. Googling yourself was always a lucky grab bag, with the possibility of long-forgotten embarrassments being dragged up. But at least you'd have to face facts. Now I hear of people discovering they're in prison, married to random people they've never met, or are actually already dead. What is this going to do to recon on…

> Now I hear of people discovering they're in prison, married to random people they've never met, or are actually already dead.

All three in my case, and that just for sites which predate AI.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#222

Post by PawgerZ »

Tao3300 wrote: post #147
StableAlkyne wrote: post #140

Earlier 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.

Hobby subreddits and technical subreddits had a lot of experts. I frequented r/excel for work a lot, and those guys were WIZARDS.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#223

Post by kumarvvr »

visarga wrote: post #193
notabee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, it is more than likely that the training inputs to upcoming LLMs will be partly from older LLM outputs.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#224

Post by grotorea »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #164
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.

Sadly Reddit is sort of monetized, as we have people selling accounts for what I believe are spamming and propaganda purposes.

Yes, but it's reddit monetizing, not the users. The users can be astroturfing, but there's no point astroturfing some types of content like game guides I hope.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#225

Post by grotorea »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #88
hashtag-til wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I love black text on white background. A rare find these days. Browsing today is like: “You ask for a spaghetti recipe and the page tell you the whole history of civilization.”

Thats specific to recipes because they can’t be copyrighted

I heard that before and have trouble believing this is the cause at least for Internet recipes. Sure for a recipe book in 1950, but are recipe content farms going to sue each other? Isn't the lawyer costs way more than could be gained?

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#226

Post by grotorea »

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.

Not disagreeing, but that's the end of anonymity.

But yeah, maybe the idea that you can even 1% trust random content on the Internet without having a source doesn't really make sense if you think about it IMHO. Either you do this web of trust, coming from a well know real world source, or be Wikipedia-like with linked reliable sources for the viewer to check.

By the way, wasn't this how Google ranked pages back in the day? Ranking pages that get linked to higher? And even before that there were P2P web rings.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#227

Post by grotorea »

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?

The price to produce text without caring if it's true has gone down, leading to more production.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#228

Post by ryanklee »

wavemode wrote: post #162
ryanklee wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

You could probably just look up data on mental illness and/or pathological lying? Most people will say "I don't really know the details of that" rather than write you an essay of seemingly plausible but completely made up nonsense. Not all people, sure, but most.

The kind of incorrect information I am referencing is not pathological, but the type that is generated by cognitive bias and woven into the functional fabric of everyday life. It is pervasive and most people don't notice it (even when aware of specific bias types).

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#229

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

happytiger wrote: post #17
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #6

Just another reason that I consider generative AI to be a lot like crypto. A lot of talk about it being the future but really only turns out to be dangerous or useless. I find it incredibly irresponsible that companies are shoving their latest AI tech into all their products when it's still unproven.

AI has so completely disrupting Search that it’s destroyed leading platforms effectiveness in a matter of months. But because of its current lack of optimization for accuracy, we shouldn’t consider it disruptive because it’s not yet proven technology? You can call it dangerous but you can’t call it useless. It’s also only going towards improvement from here, including drastic reductions in hallucinations. You have to…

If it cannot be trusted to return accurate information without hallucinations, then it shouldn't be publicly available in a system meant to be used for finding accurate information like web search. I could see it's value in generating office documents, but even for summarizing them you still get the same problem of hallucinations.

Misinformation and disinformation is already a problem on the web and thrusting unproven technology like generative AI that has a tendency towards misinformation is opening a Pandora's box. But as long as Microsoft and Google and Meta can make their money...

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#230

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

pseudosavant wrote: post #13
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #6

Just another reason that I consider generative AI to be a lot like crypto. A lot of talk about it being the future but really only turns out to be dangerous or useless. I find it incredibly irresponsible that companies are shoving their latest AI tech into all their products when it's still unproven.

Except, unlike crypto, ChatGPT helps me with real day things that I easily find at least $20/month of value from.

I don't necessarily see a problem with it for personal use by a tech-savvy person who is aware of its problems and limitations. Releasing it upon the general public where mis/disinformation is already widespread on the internet is a terrible, terrible idea.
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