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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#51

Post by BrenBarn »

This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable.

And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end:

> The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals.

Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds.

AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#52

Post by vintermann »

shpx wrote: post #33
gerdesj wrote: post #8

I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…

If you ask ChatGPT 4o about a current event it will google things (do some sort of web search) and summarise the result.

and often I have to tell it to don't search, because it will just pull SEO polluted answers from Google and launder then slightly.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#53

Post by vintermann »

rodgerd wrote: post #32
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

There are already companies promising to attack Wikipedia and product LLM-bait YouTube content. Ship's sailed.

Sure, but what makes you think they will actually deliver that? There's no honor among spammers. If there's an obvious idea with new tech, 100 sleazy startups will claim to offer it, without even remotely having it.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#54

Post by cess11 »

cbsmith wrote: post #12

Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works. There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is…

"There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results"

No. Shitty results keep people exposed to ads for longer, on average.

'A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.'

You might be pleasantly surprised by the main work of the 2009 Nobel prize winner in economics, Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#55

Post by pjerem »

hug wrote: post #15

The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the results they found. Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your…

Happy customer of Kagi here too. However if I’m being honest, I’m starting to get LLM generated content in Kagi results.

Don’t think it’s their fault or that it happens more than everywhere else neither what they could do about it but it happens.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#56

Post by huskyr »

dhosek wrote: post #4
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

I kind of look forward to freshman composition essays “written” with AI that are rife with appeals to use online casinos.

Can't wait for all school essays promoting dubious crypto schemes of some sort.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#57

Post by rusk »

nperez wrote: post #5
boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

I'm not going to disagree because greed knows no bounds, but that could be RIP for the enthusiast crowd's proprietary LLM use. We may not have cheap local open models that beat the SOTA, but is it possible to beat an ad-poisoned SOTA model on a consumer laptop? Maybe.

On the flip side, there could be a cottage industry churning out models of various strains and purities.

This will distress the big players who want an open field to make money from their own adulterated inferior product so home grown LLM will probably end up being outlawed or something.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#58

Post by chgs »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #37
HSO wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, now try cigarettes/smoking! At least low level alcohol consumption is only detrimental to the drinker. Cigarettes start poisoning the air from the moment they are lit, and like noise pollution there is no boundary. I hate them or thrir smokers with a vengeance and the foreign satanic cabal that is „hollywood“ sold everyone out for their gold calf tobacco money

But a drunkard might sit behind the wheel, at which point it becomes detrimental to everyone on the road… And there are countless books and movies where the hero has drinks, or routinely swigs some whisky-grade stuff from a flask on his belt to calm his nerves, then drives.

Driving itself kills more people in the us every month than 9/11, yet has been glamourised for a century

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#59

Post by willvarfar »

My dream solution:

The EU creates an institution for public knowledge, a kind of library+tech solution. It probably funds classic libraries in member countries, but it also invests in tech. It dovetails nicely into a big push to get science to thrive in the EU etc.

The tech part makes a in-the-public-interest search engine and AI.

The techies are incentivised to try and whack-a-mole the classic SEO. E.g. they might spot pages that regurgitate, they might downscore sites that are ad-driven, they might upscore obvious sources of truth for things like government, they might downscore pages whose content changes too much etc.

And the AI part is not for product placement sale.

This would bring in a golden age of enlightenment, perhaps for - say - 20 years or so, before the inevitable erosion of base mission.

And all the strong data science types would want to work for it!

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#60

Post by DoctorOW »

magarnicle wrote: post #35

So why aren't real libraries like this? Can you fund the internet the same way?

The equivalent of the library for online research IS real libraries. Your library card likely gives you access to ad free online resources, I know mine does and I've been a patron of several libraries as I've moved around.
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