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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

#241

Post by godelski »

darepublic wrote: post #228
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ChatGPT in its current form can't replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there. Why can't it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation? It can include footnotes for various passages of it's answer to indicate ambiguity, varying levels of confidence, etc.

Because to make it focus on always producing accurate results (or rather a very low false positive rate) you need to dramatically change and tune the model. Which is much harder than what Google does because it means you'd also need to vet a lot of facts as well (by weighting certain sources, not individually). Or allowing it to search the internet (which also comes with other issues and if it is using Google to do that then it doesn't really kill Google). I do think Google's knowledge graph is more in line with what you're actually thinking. Lots of Google searches can be done without actually clicking links.

There's also the ethical question. For example, duckduckgo will show you stack overflow answers. Google could easily do this but they have already gotten flack for displaying answers and taking away clicks from sites, which means reduced ad revenue for the resource actually being used. We could make even stronger arguments about services like ChatGPT in their current form, let alone the one we're talking about.

If we think a bit further in the future there's another extension that might not be what we want. Suppose our model contains all current human knowledge and can accurately give you answers and even produce paragraphs at will. This kills off a lot of websites. Is this a good thing? Suppose we incorporate an image generator along similar lines and now we have text and image search. That's a huge centralization force. There are a lot of great benefits to this that I don't want to downplay, but we should also think about if this is actually what we want because there are downsides too.

I thought I should also add that I had an at length discussion of these LLMs being Stochastic Parrots (an how we know they are) in a thread from 2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34113011

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#242

Post by alvah »

charcircuit wrote: post #231
alvah wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

query: “best smart watch” Pages and pages of SEO spam, generally ranked by how big & established the site pushing said spam is, rather than any unique insights contained within.

That query is generic so you get generic results. What is best is is poorly defined.

Surely one of the purposes of a search engine is to assist the journey from generic to specific. I don’t see how filling page 1 for generic queries with non-specific DR90+ behemoths helps.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#243

Post by silisili »

riku_iki wrote: post #209
silisili wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree for a lot of queries. For example, I just got curious and asked Google how many oranges in a cup of juice. The main result is a conversion of a cup to cubic inches, for no reason. Scrolling down a bit, the first usable answer was a quora blurb. ChatGPT told me it depends on the size and type of orange, but generally 2 to 4. Guess which one I'll use next time?

You are using Google incorrectly. You need to add "reddit" at the end of all your queries.

You're not wrong. If Reddit built a useable search, my Google use would drop by 2/3.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#245

Post by alar44 »

TOMDM wrote: post #172
alar44 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mute the bark? I've never heard this. Yeah GPT didn't know what draxxed and sclounsed means, but I wouldn't expect it to.

It's semi common language in the Linux world. Here's someone using it on the mint forums https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=106218

No it isn't. That post is 10 years old. I've done multiple searches of mute the bark, Linux bark, etc etc. Can't find anything.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#246

Post by dragonwriter »

darepublic wrote: post #228
lolinder wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ChatGPT in its current form can't replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there. Why can't it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation? It can include footnotes for various passages of it's answer to indicate ambiguity, varying levels of confidence, etc.

> ChatGPT in its current form can’t replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there.

I don’t think it is.

> Why can’t it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation?

Because it is a statistical text-generation model; connection of results to specific sources is fundamentally not part of the way it works, so it can’t just be asked to supply them. You’d need a fundamentally different approach to do that.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#247

Post by jayant_kaushik »

What the near future would look like is- 1. Google: will implement some form of LLM on their engine and the contextual answers will significantly improve(~close to what ChatGPT produces) satisfying most people. But also displays the top links that contributed to the context. This is difficult to do but somehow they gotta figure out or risk their entire core business getting affected.

2. ChatGPT and other LLMs: will take some more time to meaningfully compete with google(as in becoming a noun) and in the mean time they would provide APIs to their models so that large orgs(businesses, scientists etc) can plug it in with their own data and use. They may or may not charge a fee for it.

In both cases there is one big pro and con: Pro: Death of SEO and ads as we know it Con: The model dictates what majority of internet users read, change their views or manipulate. And eventually becomes an AI weapon.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#248

Post by eks391 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #195
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…

Today I have zero confidence in chatGPT, OR my ability to evaluate and correct it's inaccuracies strictly from within its interface. I feel I can compensate for search engine and arrive at answer I seek within my confidence interval via search engine. It's a tool that can get me there. That may change in the future. Based on my limited understanding on how chatgpt works,I don't see how though - it explicitly is not d…

> Today I have zero confidence in chatGPT, OR my ability to evaluate and correct it's inaccuracies strictly from within its interface.

Definitely not within chatgpt itself. I was using chatgpt recently for the first time and came to the conclusion to take its output with the weight of a trusted friend. I was asking questions on topics I had genuine curiousity about and that I didnt know the answer, and it led me to some information that I thought interesting, so I wanted to know more. Thats where I turned to my fav search engine and looked into, continuing my session with chatgpt to clear passages it spat. It steered me in a direction I didnt know existed, and I used the internet to verify the information and acquire me detail. Yesterday I tried out asking it for help on a coding project, and it introduced me to a helpful package I didnt know about, but the code it suggested using didnt actually work and was riddled with errors as I tried to use it in the way it suggested. I would have been blown away if it worked, so this was no big deal. I think I would have been faster just using stackexchange though.

> So today I don't see it replacing search engine for me.

I will continue to use the resources I already use to find respective authenticatable information, but I do think it is still useful for those things where I have no idea where to begin, so it can set me in a direction where resources already exist.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#249

Post by hasmanean »

lolinder wrote: post #240
darepublic wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT in its current form can't replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there. Why can't it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation? It can include footnotes for various passages of it's answer to indicate ambiguity, varying levels of confidence, etc.

For the same reason why it might produce a bogus answer: it's a language model, not a general AI. Prompt it for footnotes and it will generate footnotes for books that don't exist or that don't actually contain the citation. They'll match the form of a footnote, because that's what the model was trained to do, but the citations won't resolve. For example, I asked who the first president of Argentina was. It gave the…

That makes sense. The only thing about gpt that impressed me was when I asked it to condense an answer into one sentence, it was able to do it.

Other than that it betrayed no understanding of the material. It rather resembled a high school kid who had read a few too many books and spouted platitudes about any and all subjects without being aware of what was really going on.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#250

Post by lolinder »

enjoylife wrote: post #237
darepublic wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT in its current form can't replace google but plausible to think in its next few incarnations it will get there. Why can't it have a mode where it returns more rigorous results, and includes some system of links as citation? It can include footnotes for various passages of it's answer to indicate ambiguity, varying levels of confidence, etc.

This is the mental leap folks need to be making, the question is when will this type of configurably factual large language model be research benchmarked and productionized. I have read many similar comments to the grandparent, all saying the same thing, “I tried it, and it turned up wrong facts” all the while they forgot that they were deeply engaged with the content it was producing. Just think of how much our atte…

My argument isn't that I tried it and it didn't work, my argument is that an LLM alone fundamentally cannot work for reliable information retrieval.

Producing hallucinations or not isn't just a setting you can tweak in the model. The entire function of GPT-3 is to guess the next word from the words that came before. It's a hallucination machine that has been trained on so much real-world data and has such a large parameter set that for commonly known and discussed information it does a remarkably good job at creating factual sentences. But as soon as you get out into territory that it doesn't have memorized, it will do the next best thing and produce credible-sounding new material that may or may not be complete nonsense. Again, this isn't a setting you can tune, it's just what a transformer does. It models human language, not all of human cognition.

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