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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#861

Post by alephxyz »

zeven7 wrote: post #544
umvi wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Searching for a song by typing in lyrics is specifically a feature I’ve noticed Google can’t do any more. And it used to be able to.

Not just lyrics. Searching for quotations or text excerpts is much harder and double quotes to only get exact matches also returns unrelated results.

On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#862

Post by bathwaterpizza »

weberer wrote: post #796
DeathArrow wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI produces a correct answer for something you know, there's no guarantee that it produces the correct answer for something you don't know. I'd rather find a way to verify that answer, if that answer has any importance.

Perplexity adds citations to the end of each statement. Its nice to be able to go to the primary source and verify whether its mixing anything up.

This is just unrealistic, if I have to check the sources every time I'd rather Google it.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#863

Post by jumping_frog »

adamhp wrote: post #830
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…

> 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. It is very similar. Google decides what to present to you on the front page. I'm sure there are metrics on how few peop…

This is true of the feeds and everything else where there are abundant choices. Amazon putting its inhouse brands before others. Anything which has to be narrowed down is an algorithmic choice, either data driven or top-down.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#864

Post by komali2 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #856
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…

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)

Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context.

The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#865

Post by jumping_frog »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #673
judahmeek wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good. How are we seeing how that pans out when Australia's misinformation bill is still just a proposal?

Fair point. I think just that there's a general acceptance that "something must be done" and that the government are the people to do it is pretty alarming. It's a short step from here to a Ministry of Truth, and I can see Australia taking that step pretty soon.

I have a physics analogy which is similar. Vested interests set up magnetic fields in social media / legacy media (lot of things discussed prominently in social media is just what legacy media is saying. So legacy media is a sense is setting up an anchor points and people have to distribute themselves around it) to flip magnetic domains to align with the narrative.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#866

Post by charlieyu1 »

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…

> Who Gets To Decide What is True?

Outsourced workers in less expensive places of the world providing human feedback.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#867

Post by halfcat »

the__alchemist wrote: post #856
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…

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)

In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town.

We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#868

Post by zamadatix »

mcpar-land wrote: post #855
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!

Isn't it even a bit interesting that GP has tried it every time something new has come out but not once gotten the expected answer? Not only that but gets the wrong titles even though Search for everyone else is using the exact Wikipedia link given in the comment as the source?

LLMs are run with variable output, sure, but it's particularly odd if GP used the search product as it doesn't have to provide the facts from the model itself in that case. If GP had posted the link to the actual chat rather than provided a link to chatgpt.com (???) I'd be interested in seeing if Search was even used as that'd at least explain where such variance in output came from. Instead we're all talking about what could have happened or not.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#869

Post by Permit »

Liquix wrote: post #132
qwertox wrote: post #64

Makes me question why Google never bothered to create something like search sessions which could be enriched with comments/notes and would be located in a sidebar just like the chats in ChatGPT/Claude/Mistral are. They really had the potential to do something interesting, but were just focused on their ad metrics with the "good enough" search box. What have they been doing all the time?

the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate, or make their search any better because they no longer play by the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system. [0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

What does this mean? Like, I work there and I’d be pretty annoyed if they stopped turning a profit as a collapse of the stock price would affect my compensation.

It’s interesting to hear this take because I’m used to hearing the opposite: that Google is too focused on increasing short-term profit at the expense of product quality.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#870

Post by foobarian »

senko wrote: post #808
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…

This nails it: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? I would not agree to this however: > It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, With current search engines, Google decides for you ("helped" by SEO experts failing over themselves to rank higher because their revenue directly depends on it). In theory, you could go an read a few dozen pages and decide for yourself. In reality, n…

Ultimately it's an incentive problem. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
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