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Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

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Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#221

Post by sunaookami »

kjs3 wrote: post #103
cheesecakegood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.

I don't notice it's hallucinations (in the sense of making up answers) so much as where it's simply wrong. For example, earlier in the week, I was working with product X, and since the original vendor of X doesn't really support it any more, I asked "who else sells product X under their own brand", and Google AI quickly told me that noone else sells product X, that it was full of proprietary tech and quickly devolved…

I think one of the big problems is that the AI Mode and the AI Overview thingy rely on the found web sources too much. They seem to be the ground truth which often conflicts with Gemini's internal knowledge rather than "enriching" it.

EDIT: Like this comment said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538500

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#222

Post by sunaookami »

rvba wrote: post #195
toddmorey wrote: post #79

I do think models currently don't have enough source skepticism. If you look at agent traces when asked to compare two options to help inform a decision, many of the comparison pages cited in research are often hosted by one of the companies being compared; nearly all are AI-generated AEO plays. Not deeply considering the motive of published information is currently a glitch that can be exploited, but the window will…

Or reddit - lies writen by other LLMs or by paid shills.

Reminds me of this ad from the pre-LLM days! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_Google_Home_advert...

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#223

Post by boomlinde »

xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

The humorous LLM-generated blurb Google frequently places before the useful search results once referred me to Grokipedia, an LLM-generated repository of vibe-facts seemingly created more to illustrate some reactionary point than to actually serve a practically useful purpose to anyone.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#224

Post by steveBK123 »

This kind of stuff seems obvious. It's a big headwind to all of the "the world will become agentic, the bots will just go out and do stuff for you" hype.

Anything involving money is an adversarial adaptive system.

Besides GEO/SEO, getting redirected by sponsored content/paid ads, and generally funneled to making the best purchases for everyone other than you... your bot is going to get mugged by the agentic equivalent of Nigerian prince scams.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#226

Post by elAhmo »

Google cites them too. As a user of both Google and Perplexity, they are just showing what information is out there to the user. This is just sad reality of what internet has become.

Similar example is Google Images and nearly every picture being from Pinterest, as they have figured a way to manipulate rankings.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#228

Post by bmacho »

dspillett wrote: post #149
xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

> If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones That makes sense. What an LLM does is output what the model thinks is the best set of tokens in response to a given input, so when you ask it to judge the best response to that input it is going to conclude that the best one is the one that must closely matches what it would output, which is…

> That makes sense.

No, it doesn't if the "which one do you prefer" was just a prompt continuation task. LLMs can't see their own evaluation of a given text. If you ask them to continue

  Which one you prefer
  
  > option 1: human text
  
  > option 2: ai text
And they continue with

  option 2: ai text is the better one because [reasons]
then it is not because they evaluated these 2 texts on themselves, observed the evaluation numbers and reported which one is better.

Also, if you instruct humans to come up with the best text they can, and you show them an even better text, they will prefer the better one written by someone else.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#230

Post by sodapopcan »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #160
sodapopcan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO is what ruined the web AFAIC. > Time to start some human-only darknets. I know very little about darknets. How could you ensure that they are human-only?

The golden age of internet was during seo, what are you talking about?

You're right, but along the lines of what another user mentioned, my memories of "the golden age" had little to do with commerce and just visiting cool and interesting websites. I used Yahoo! right up until google became a thing, so SEO wasn't on my radar until the early '00s.
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