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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

#281

Post by singularity2001 »

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.

Contrary to all the naysayers I think a future version of GTP will be trained to evaluate its own certainty and express this verbally. Probably through an extra training channel.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#283

Post by tinyhouse »

An important point about the authors of this post. They are very biased (at least Bender) because they are academic who have been fighting large language models from industry for years now. The main reason is that they make all their research obsolete so they fight to keep their relevancy.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#284

Post by napier »

Not yet 1:1 replacement, but AI chatbot agents that are capable of interpretable chain of thought reasoning and conduct searches to fill gaps in knowledge and check their sources will be highly disruptive to legacy search and will supplement, and even replace legacy search engines in many use cases.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#285

Post by lamontcg »

enlyth wrote: post #57
userbinator wrote: post #34

They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are turning into AI chatbots too. When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI". Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.

A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots") I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of more technical search engine for developers and the classic Goo…

> A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want

not really. the problem is that is way too easy to game.

i want that when you really get down to highly specific technical details, but not for the average everyday internet search where i'm not searching for something that thousands of people haven't searched for in the past week.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#286

Post by charcircuit »

alvah wrote: post #242
charcircuit wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to do. If you were a search engine and someone searched "dog" what websites would you return?

You can't really tell what the user wants.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#287

Post by Gigachad »

charcircuit wrote: post #233
Gigachad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most trivial queries. Try something like “best frypan” and it becomes a lot harder to find real content that isn’t sponsored junk. Adding “reddit” to the query is the best option so far.

Google doesn't know the fact of what frying pan is objectively the best and websites containing such an answer are going to be biased. That's an impossible query to answer with more personalization which may not even be possible.

Good results exist, and they are mostly on reddit. The commercial blogspam drowns out the quality though.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#289

Post by dr_dshiv »

elicksaur wrote: post #257
joe_the_user wrote: post #234

Earlier 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.

It’s really good at showing what types of scientific books and papers should exist. GPT5 will just write them, so it isn’t lying.
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