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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

#181

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

lhl wrote: post #134
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…

I had a similar experience recently looking some stuff for Starfield. Content farms are obviously switching to LLM-generated (mostly hallucinated) articles and Google seems to be ranking them pretty highly atm. Kagi's ability to manually downrank/remove those kinds of results from your searches (and their return to flat rate pricing) finally tipped the scales for me for subscribing/switching search.

Speaking of Kagi, here is its “quick answer”:

> In Baldur's Gate 3, silver ingots are a common miscellaneous item that can be found in various locations such as chests, shops, and dropped by enemies.[1] Each silver ingot can be exchanged for 50 gold at merchants or traders.[2] While silver ingots do not have any crafting or upgrade uses currently in early access, they provide a reliable source of income early in the game before other money-making options become available.[3]

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#183

Post by Conscat »

cheald wrote: post #157
Tao3300 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit may not have experts per set, but in the right subreddits it definitely has enthusiasts. In ages gone by, you'd find the same people on message boards or forums, talking up and comparing the minute details of this or that. There's obviously the same risk of cargo culting that there's always been, but there's genuinely useful information available from people who spend way more time than the common man on their…

I think, at least on programming language subreddits, there are people who deserve to be labeled experts. r/cpp has some frequent users who work on standards proposals or compiler features. There are also subreddits dedicated just to communicating with experts, like r/askdocs

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#184

Post by bennyg »

Gigachad wrote: post #179
yellow_postit wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has raised so much money and is part of the inflated valuation unicorns that I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat get forced into Ads

The point is the user posting isn't able to put their own ads in. So they can't profit by flooding the platform with crap.

Just wait for elevated server roles where the pfp and account banner are ads

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#185

Post by [deleted] »

danielsgriffin wrote: post #123
kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #42

Without naming the company, I have seen specific examples of blog posts being written by AI, hallucinating a "fact", and then that "fact" re-surfacing inside of Bard. Its xkcd's Citogenesis automated and at internet scale https://xkcd.com/978/

Someone on Twitter just tried asking Bard [are you familiar with a paper called "A Short History of Searching"] and Bard responded by linking Claude Shannon to a fabrication. https://twitter.com/nunohipolito/status/1710063374145343511

[deleted]

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#186

Post by p_j_w »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #182

You should never have had been trusting what you find on the web, let alone other media. I hope widespread usage of generative AIs including deepfakes will finally force the masses to start thinking more critically.

This is an absurd proposition. How is one supposed to think critically when there's nowhere to go for reliable information? We'll be left just taking shots in the dark, what little amount of informed reasoning we had before will be replaced by pure conjecture. There won't be any increase in critical thinking.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#187

Post by 90-00-09 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #114
l33t7332273 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not easy for a regular person to obtain access to a .edu webpage.

A "regular person" can: - Enroll or be hired at an eligible institution. There are literally thousands of these. - Bribe or compromise someone enrolled or hired at an eligible institution. - Create a de novo eligible institution. For-profit colleges are not uncommon. Someone motivated by profit or advantage would likely find virtually any of these options quite straightforward. I'm ... somewhat pained that this needs…

A "regular person" also can:

- start their own country and call it Edunistan

- bribe ICANN to take over the .edu TLD

- open a university in the new country

- spend 15 years earning a PhD at that university

- reserve ~/name and start posting LLM generated content

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#188

Post by loveparade »

michaelteter wrote: post #165

The signal to noise ratio of web search results has been trending toward utter uselessness for years; so while AI content will make it worse, it won't make it dramatically worse. We'll just advance toward useless at a higher rate.

To me, "advance towards useless at a (possibly exponentially) higher rate" means that it makes it dramatically worse. Also, the convergence point is difference. At some point human-generated spam content is no longer worth it because the costs exceed the profits. With AI making the process cheaper, you get to a much higher ratio of spam.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#190

Post by loveparade »

Gigachad wrote: post #179
yellow_postit wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has raised so much money and is part of the inflated valuation unicorns that I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if they somewhat get forced into Ads

The point is the user posting isn't able to put their own ads in. So they can't profit by flooding the platform with crap.

It's only a matter of time before things change with Discord monetization. On reddit there is an incentive to create LLM-powered fake accounts with high karma and sell them. It's true that on Discord this incentive doesn't exist right now because no karma equivalent is associated with Discord accounts, but eventually that's going to change as Discord, as a company, will try to monetize their user data in various ways.

It's the typical overvalued VC-backed company dilemma that needs investor returns. Quora, Medium, and so on.

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