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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#851

Post by lancesells »

narrator wrote: post #842
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

Remember the semantic web where people annotate search pages with data? I think the "meta" keywords tag was the closest that ever got to adoption. Guess why it failed? It was largely used as a way to trick search engines. Same reason as your vision of the perfectly honest and correct search engine and look chatbot will never be perfect. It's because people lie to search engines to spam and get traffic they don't dese…

> It was largely used as a way to trick search engines.

I imagine this happens with LLMs and everything else over time. Along with the ads and pay for placement.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#852

Post by topaz0 »

sethammons wrote: post #801
topaz0 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we get to see how OpenAI will do similar harm, more effectively and at much greater environmental cost.

I feel like we have an opportunity to break a feedback loop. SEO worked because of links. No links in my chatgpt discussions. Ah, but what about all the junk ai gen content you may counter, but that stuff only works because of SEO links. As more people abandon searching for links for discussions, the SEO usefulness diminishes. Maybe to the point where many parasites stop making SEO shite in the first place.

I wasn't even talking about the information pollution -- I was talking about boiling the ocean. Not that I'm not concerned about the former.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#853

Post by CaptainFever »

submeta wrote: post #519
amiantos wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I publish my content "for free" because I want to spread knowledge and information, or promote a topic or interest I enjoy, and monetization has never been a priority for me. I know that I am not alone. The urge to create does not depend on a need for money. I am happy for my websites to be picked up by Perplexity or ChatGPT because I want more people to see/learn/hear about the things I care about. If someone only c…

Absolutely this! Actually the internet was driven by people who wanted to share their ideas, not by those who wanted to sell their ideas.

I've been thinking about this. There's three main solutions (https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/economics/fr...) to the Free Rider Problem, which comes up with non-scarce goods like this.

The first is taxation. Academia uses this. So we'll be fine there.

The second is donations and altruism. This includes Wikipedia, people who just want to share their ideas (like I'm doing now), Stack Exchange, etc. So we'll be fine there too, though this only works for low-budget stuff. Note that credit isn't necessary here; Wikipedia editors are rarely acknowledged, for example. But I do think credit is good, when possible (i.e. not for every single training source the LLM uses; ChatGPT Search is a good and practical way to give credit).

The third is to privatize the goods, for example, by creating copyright. LLMs won't get rid of this. They're not allowed to fully replicate a piece of text, since that is copyright infringement. So if you're getting people to pay for an exact or almost exact piece of text (e.g. a full book, a full newspaper article), you won't be affected there.

But if your business model would be affected by people summarizing your stuff, then yeah you won't be protected there. For example, if people would rather read a summary of your article or book rather than pay you for the full version. But this isn't new to LLMs. How many people jump straight to the comments to read the summaries instead of reading the article? How many people absolutely refuse to pay for paywalls? How many people block ads (I'm treating ads as a form of payment here)? It's possible to expand copyright to also cover things like summarization (i.e. copyrighting facts), but this is rather dangerous.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#855

Post by mcpar-land »

GolfPopper wrote: post #602

Every time I see one of these topics, I go ask chat GPT a question to which I know the answer on a topic where I would like to be able to get useful answers to similar questions that I do not know the answer to. This time it was, "Did Paul Edwin Zimmer write a fourth Dark Border novel?" (Real answer: Yes, Ingulf the Mad . You can find the answer on his Wikipedia page.[1]) ChatGPT's[2] answer: "Yes, Paul Edwin Zimmer…

A lot of these responses are so funny. "Um, when _I_ asked this question to ChatGPT it gave the right answer!" Yeah, because it's flaky! It doesn't give the same answer every time! That's the worst possible outcome!

Re: ChatGPT Search

#856

Post by the__alchemist »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #651
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)

Re: ChatGPT Search

#857

Post by yonaguska »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #651
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously)

legally no, practically- yes. In most states, you simply must attest that you are a citizen in order to register. In many states, non-citizens have been auto-registered to vote when attaining drivers licenses. Reddit is full of panicked immigrants concerned that they found themselves registered to vote, and worried about how that would affect their status.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#858

Post by Nashooo »

umvi wrote: post #451
whizzter wrote: post #300

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over a…

At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g ), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your q…

Funnily enough that search now finds your comment

Re: ChatGPT Search

#859

Post by azangru »

belter wrote: post #836
marcus_holmes wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

> Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Seems particularly to be a US based phenomenon. Unlike the more transparent manipulation seen under dictatorships... Where people generally recognize propaganda for what it is, even if they can’t openly challenge it—some in USA live within entirely new realities.

I disagree with this. Strongly.

Remember the covid years, when what was true kept changing rapidly, and sometimes what was said on the fringe and considered misinformation was later adopted by mainstream. Vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. Oh no they don't. Don't wear masks. Oh no, do wear masks. Oh, whatever, cloth masks are face decorations anyway. Lockdowns are good. Oh, lockdowns were a mistake. Don't treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Oh, do treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Lab leak is a conspiracy theory. Oh, maybe lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. And so on, and so forth...

Or take a look at how not just the media, but even the government in the UK or Canada liberally put labels such as "far right", "alt right", "antisemitic", etc. on their opponents, and how these labels pop up in Wikipedia. Are they true?

Re: ChatGPT Search

#860

Post by CaptainFever »

lionkor wrote: post #790

Good thing I already took down my blog :) Hope everyone else does the same. Not putting any effort in to make OpenAI even more money, thanks

ChatGPT Search is literally adding links back to websites, though? It's just a better Google Search.

Anyway. I've licensed my stuff as public domain to make it easier for ~~OpenAI to make more money~~ the AI ecosystem to develop.

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