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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

#41

Post by 12_throw_away »

happytiger wrote: post #17
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #6

Just another reason that I consider generative AI to be a lot like crypto. A lot of talk about it being the future but really only turns out to be dangerous or useless. I find it incredibly irresponsible that companies are shoving their latest AI tech into all their products when it's still unproven.

AI has so completely disrupting Search that it’s destroyed leading platforms effectiveness in a matter of months. But because of its current lack of optimization for accuracy, we shouldn’t consider it disruptive because it’s not yet proven technology? You can call it dangerous but you can’t call it useless. It’s also only going towards improvement from here, including drastic reductions in hallucinations. You have to…

> It’s also only going towards improvement from here

Why?

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#43

Post by heavyset_go »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #33
pseudosavant wrote: post #12

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contaminated' with LLM stuff, but it'll be everywhere after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

Can't prove it, but it seems to me like black text on white background sites from the past are poorly ranked compared to sites with "modern" layouts.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#45

Post by loupol »

abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

Agreed that web search quality has been deteriorating since much earlier than LLMs gaining popularity.

Interestingly, we are in spot right now where I feel that for certain types of queries LLMs can outperform search engines. But from what is shown in the article, it seems like that state might only be temporary, and that in the same way that shitty content farms mastered SEO and polluted search results, we might see the same happening with LLMs that have access to the Internet.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#46

Post by dredmorbius »

ratg13 wrote: post #27
DayDollar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a web of trust, with a valuation of nodes by trustworthyness. And people will get only one id for this. Ones name is ones value and a reputation will be a hard earned thing again.

This was how the "internet" functions in the book "Ender's Game". There is a small sub-plot about how he had to give a fake persona credibility on the untrusted network in order to be able to leverage a creating a fake account on the trusted network.

I find the xkcd interpretation more realistic: https://xkcd.com/635/>

Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De...>

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#47

Post by steelframe »

tredre3 wrote: post #24
RandomWorker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is to avoid this have a personal blog. That being said how many people write blogs with grammerly or chatgpt these days. The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. My sense is that you use this technology you might be happy with the results at first but on later review you just notice something off in some sentences and maybe it…

> The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. I don't know about that. I have played with ChatGPT/Copilot/etc enough to know what they're capable of doing. But the thing is, I enjoy programming. I enjoy breaking down a problem and solving it with code. I enjoy crafting elegant code. So I don't use AI even though I'm fully aware it could s…

> So I don't use AI even though I'm fully aware it could save me hours on projects.

Enjoy this luxury while it lasts. Based on what I have seen in performance review committees for software developers, your peers who drive results faster than you do because they use AI will be rewarded more and will be more likely to survive rounds of layoffs when they inevitably happen.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#48

Post by JSavageOne »

jfengel wrote: post #35
abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me. I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site. When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up. The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange artic…

Google search to retrieve specific factual information is pretty good.

Google search to retrieve anything opinion related has been horrible and infested with blogspam for years (hence people searching Reddit to get that kind of info).

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#49

Post by 0xEFF »

12_throw_away wrote: post #41
happytiger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has so completely disrupting Search that it’s destroyed leading platforms effectiveness in a matter of months. But because of its current lack of optimization for accuracy, we shouldn’t consider it disruptive because it’s not yet proven technology? You can call it dangerous but you can’t call it useless. It’s also only going towards improvement from here, including drastic reductions in hallucinations. You have to…

> It’s also only going towards improvement from here Why?

See for yourself, 4.0 is clearly improved over 3.5.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#50

Post by fnordpiglet »

JSavageOne wrote: post #48
jfengel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me. I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site. When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up. The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange artic…

Google search to retrieve specific factual information is pretty good. Google search to retrieve anything opinion related has been horrible and infested with blogspam for years (hence people searching Reddit to get that kind of info).

Google search to retrieve product marketing pages is pretty good. Specific factual information searches lead to product marketing pages. Opinion searches lead to product marketing pages.

Google is a giant adware tool that’s been taken over by adware SEO sites. The example given - find the product marketing pages for some races - falls directly in its sweet spot. If you venture outside it’ll do its best to get you back into the product marketing sweet spot, and the SEO companies of the world take care of the rest.

Search is a lost cause.

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