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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#131

Post by dmix »

lolinder wrote: post #106
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

> Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time

Are we using the same search engine? I use DuckDuckGo most of the time but Google is hardly terrible, even if it could be improved.

I find what I’m looking for in the top results 90-95% of the time. The other 5-10% also contains times where there simply isn’t a good link that solves what I’m looking for even after digging hard.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#132

Post by solarkraft »

lolinder wrote: post #86
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth. This doesn't mean that it…

I believe this to be a huge deal. In no time a huge part of the internet will be AI-generated and we will pollute our data set for research and training AI with things that are subtly or completely false at times and we won't be able to tell.

It's a lot like iRobot or other stories in which the robots will start to subtly misbehave, like a program you can't debug.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#133

Post by dragonwriter »

AI chatbots are (or will be) a replacement for the user interface of search engines.

They'll still be backed by search engines.

(And this isn't news; Google has been saying this for well over a decade, I think, by this point, and Google, Amazon, and others have been doing it with simpler chatbots, primarily for voice assistants, for some time; LLMs are a big step forward for this—though I suspect that per request resource usage is far more.)

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#134

Post by throwaway14356 »

This was written by a human? It could have been but it reads like it was unfolded from 1 perhaps 2 lines of.. lets say beef. There is very little going on in the text, the blog post is the [now usual] short form free from interesting references to previous writings around this argument, as if the topic was entirely original and invented here

Good references, more than anything, suggest to me an author knows his topic.

The www as a festival of sharing knowledge is really not what we thought it would become or perhaps could or should have.

The author, like most, is definitely capable of writing, sourcing and building(!) something into the chronology of the topic.

But ok, to entertain the idea: I think a chat bot the way companies and government tried to glue it onto their knowledge base (and mostly failed) will now become a real possibility, it will be able to find the most likely document you are looking for and know when the match is to crappy to mention.

An all knowing AI is not required. Have one per domain and let them exchange words.

Real time learning from the conversation is still off but I imagine that could easily change.

Thinking about it, if you want request all information about you from the data hoarders you could build quite the interface to represent you in the bot net. It doesn't have to know hoe to fill taxes as long as there is a tax bot available for 7.3241 dollar per query. Your personal assistant can learn the bits of tax code relevant to your disposition. Seems fun.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

permo-w wrote: post #58
dpkirchner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are also low scoring.

you could probably ask it

You can ask it, and it may generate text with a score, but there is no particular reason that the score generated in the text would reflect any internal score it has.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#136

Post by doliveira »

brookst wrote: post #87
EGreg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by believable content generated by swarms of internet bots. Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running for president. Nevermind that he wasn’t born in the USA… somehow mysterio…

What’s different about AI? People are cheap. Anyone who wants to do this can already do it just with mechanical Turk or just hiring writers in low income countries.

AI is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster, not to mention amoral.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#137

Post by ycombobreaker »

fragmede wrote: post #85
WJW wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early…

To take your parenthetical further, I'm sure they'll get to that. It was only 5 years ago that searching Google for "how old is the Earth" said 6000 years because only the young Earth creationists put such a huge stake into SEO for their pages. https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/70mdfj/recently_go...

Google or any search engine provides links to relevant documents, whereas ChatGPT functions as a pure summary. Neither the search engine nor language model summary should be treated as authoritative, but at least a search engine cites its sources.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#138

Post by Cypher »

lolinder wrote: post #86
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth. This doesn't mean that it…

get the journals open source and add it as a module, although you'd have to strip out the unreproducible social science studies but that could be a good thing.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#139

Post by cookie_monsta »

skilled wrote: post #46

When ChatGPT came out I used it to do 100 hours worth of work in 10 hours or so. But it still felt like work. And for more intricate use cases it is just easier to do traditional research. We’re safe for a while still. And when I say we I mean writers.

> I used it to do 100 hours worth of work in 10 hours or so

That's still pretty impressive, regardless of what you estimate your hourly rate at.

I've had a go at using it for some (tedious non-fiction) writing tasks that I have been completely unenthusiastic about, but its style is so bland I would be embarrassed to put my name to it.

It does work ok to get the motor running, though - kind of like a targeted writing prompt.

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