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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
271–280 of 415 posts
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#272Not sure if I'm missing something but if the authors claim:
1. That chatbots don't understand what they are producing -> a search engine doesn't either.
2. The benefit of search is that you engage in sense-making -> you actually need to do that with a chatbot too.
3. You would want access to the sources -> that's already fixed for today's chatbots (see perplexity.ai, for example, which offers links next to its claims).
4. We may trust chatbots more easily because of their language: we already have that problem with search results.
I understand the idea that there will not be an ever-knowing AI and we will probably don't even want one. But what we have today seems an improvement over a search engine (not necessarily a replacement).
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#273Earlier 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?
I just asked Google assistant this: "How many oranges are in a cup of juice?". It responded with: "Two to three oranges", and then followed up with more information why and a link to the source where it derived the information ( https://www.webstaurantstore.com/blog/2760/juice-in-citrus-f... ). I'm not sure why you didn't get this, but it seems better than ChatGPT.
I should have said queried Google, perhaps. I typed in exactly 'how many oranges in a cup of juice', without the quotes.
Interestingly, if I add 'are' as in 'how many oranges are in a cup of juice', it doesn't do that weird cu in conversion and gives a reasonable answer.
That seems like an odd parsing choice for lack of a, in this case, fluff word, as the former is how I would ask the question... though maybe I'm the odd one.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#274Q: how might an AI algorithm be modified in order to return citations with its response?
A: There are several ways in which an AI algorithm could be modified to return citations with its responses. Here are a few possibilities:
One approach would be to add a citation generation module to the AI algorithm. This module could be trained on a dataset of citations and could be used to generate appropriate citations for the information provided by the AI algorithm.
Another option would be to modify the AI algorithm to include a database of references, with each reference being associated with a specific piece of information. When the AI algorithm provides a response, it could also return the appropriate reference(s) from the database.
A third possibility would be to modify the AI algorithm to search external sources of information (such as online databases or libraries) for relevant citations whenever it provides a response. The AI could then return the relevant citations along with its response.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#275The 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 wasn't aware Google produces accurate facts. Cf. front page links to Wikipedia as an obvious counter.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#276The 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…
But that assumes search just involves document searching for retrieving information.
What about, I don't know, searching for a website with certain functionality/services?
What people really mean when they say LLMs will replace search is that it'll replace Quora/stack overflow/etc, which is clearly not the same thing!
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#277The 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…
> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents This is the "self-driving cars will obviously be better than human drivers given that they're trained on millions of humans' driving behavior" of chatbots. In my experience, this is a huge stretch and wishful thinking.
I mean, it happens in stages - I’m already using chatgpt for plenty of useful tasks that I would otherwise google (and then some). Similarly self driving cars are better than humans at plenty of specific things (collision detection/aversion for instance) but not a wholesale replacement of humans just yet obviously.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#278Earlier 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.
when i couldn't find any good search result. i append reddit at the end. and voila i got some good results. even if they are not exact, they tell me what to look for.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#279The 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…
Have you already replaced Google with ChatGPT whole it's free? What are your Google usecases?
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely this. I just did a discussion with ChatGPT on intuitionistic logic and it gave answers that were subtly wrong in my understanding of the subject. I have an MA in math but I couldn't be sure whether my impression of its wrongness was correct until asked it for a reference and it gave a nonexistent book by Per Martin-Lof, "Intuitionistic Logic", along with a list of actual books by him. It's an impressive an…
No, you are probably right. It has no guardrails for generating a true citation. When you ask it for citations, its programming generates the form of citation. As the authors of the article discuss, it has no model of reality to understand that citations are not just a form of words and symbols put together.
> As the authors of the article discuss, it has no model of reality to understand that citations are not just a form of words and symbols put together.
Which is the exact same issue that plagues it for the answer it’s generating a citation for.
I believe that it can be trained to improve this, and I believe it can be nearly solvable but I don’t believe it’s a solvable problem.
It can be trained to get facts mostly right using old-school academic tests and adversarial/supervised training, like an elementary school child. Today, it (supposedly?) punts math and some other logix to a separate function, and it just compiled the prompt. That can work for validating citations and “known facts” in many cases.
But again, it can’t “think” and understand when it returns something illogical (regardless of fact correctness).