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Comparing Google and ChatGPT

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Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#61

Post by CommieBobDole »

drchopchop wrote: post #6

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

I ran across a site a while back which just seems to be common questions fed to GPT-3; the answers all make perfect grammatical sense, but they're also hilariously wrong. A bunch of middle school kids are probably going to get an F on their papers and simultaneously learn something about the importance of verifying information found on the internet.

https://knologist.com/has-any-rover-landed-on-venus/

"The average car on Venus lasts around 5000 miles, but some cars last up to 10 times that."

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#62

Post by brundolf »

ben_w wrote: post #42
drchopchop wrote: post #6

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

I just tried Googling "when did the moon explode?" to see if it still gave authoritative answers to bogus questions: > About an hour after sunset on June 18, 1178, the Moon exploded. "when did lincoln shoot booth" > April 14, 1865 Mostly they seem to catch and stop this now, but there was a fun brief period where it was popping up the fact-box for whatever seemed closest to the search terms, so "when did neil armstro…

And on top of that- more and more web content (especially dubious content) is going to start being generated by these kinds of models, which will bring down the quality of Google results too

Maybe Google starts filtering down more aggressively to only trusted sources (by domain or whatever else)- but could you do the same thing with a model like this, to improve its accuracy? Right now it's trained on the whole internet, but I doubt it has to be. At that point it really is just a competing indexing system

I bet you could even train it to find and list sources for its claims

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#63

Post by donio »

drchopchop wrote: post #6

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

And those answers are not just wrong but confidently wrong.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#64

Post by codeviking »

echelon wrote: post #14
jstx1 wrote: post #2

I don’t think so. Google is still a search engine first and a question answering machine second. And for the question answering I will still prefer links over a blob of text that can’t be inspected or verified.

> Google is still a search engine first The web has eroded to a place where a few platforms contain most of the salient information for consumers.

Maybe you're right. But I'm not convinced.

I feel like the mass centralization of content is starting to unwind a bit. As things scale the generalized sources usually become less valuable to me. With more content comes more noise, and that noise is hard to sift through. And while Google isn't perfect, they're better at sifting through this noise than most sites are.

Take StackOverflow as an example. When it first emerged I found it really useful. Answers were generally high quality. There were valuable discussions about the merits of one approach versus another. Now it's a sea of duplicate questions, poor answers and meandering discussions. I rarely visit it anymore, as it's rarely helpful. And I regularly have to correct information others glean from it, as it's often wrong or incomplete.

So I suppose this all goes to say that I'm optimistic that things are headed in the right direction. I imagine things will ebb and flow for some time. But I believe Google and other search engines will always have a role to play, as there will always be new, valuable things to discover.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#65

Post by qwertox »

I asked it to show me an example code for a Websocket server using Axum and it spit out some .NET code.

But while using it, generally I had the feeling that this could one day (3-4 years?) replace Google almost completely for all my code-related searches, which make up more than half for all my Google searches.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#66

Post by [deleted] »

blamestross wrote: post #3
jstx1 wrote: post #2

I don’t think so. Google is still a search engine first and a question answering machine second. And for the question answering I will still prefer links over a blob of text that can’t be inspected or verified.

Plus, who is going to produce the corpus you feed the magic chat engine?

[deleted]

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#69

Post by adoxyz »

drchopchop wrote: post #6

It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)

No different than most Google results these days that are just SEO optimized spam that is often times flat out wrong.

Re: Comparing Google and ChatGPT

#70

Post by sho_hn »

rtkwe wrote: post #52
ben_w wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried Googling "when did the moon explode?" to see if it still gave authoritative answers to bogus questions: > About an hour after sunset on June 18, 1178, the Moon exploded. "when did lincoln shoot booth" > April 14, 1865 Mostly they seem to catch and stop this now, but there was a fun brief period where it was popping up the fact-box for whatever seemed closest to the search terms, so "when did neil armstro…

At least there it's still linking to the original source where the information is contextualized or correct. GPT-3 will just spit out an answer with no links so you either trust it got it right or you go to google to confirm it basically eliminating the reason to go to GPT in the first place.

Until the source Google points at is a GPT-generated text.

Do we have models yet that identify GPT responses vs. human-authored text? :-)

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