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AI Ruined Quora

jonn.substack.com

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Re: AI Ruined Quora

#62

Post by mort96 »

devjab wrote: post #10

I wonder if it would really come down to AI if you did the user research, maybe focused on the “onboarding” process. I remember a time back when you would get a Quora result on a search query and you could click on it be find a few answers with comments on them to help you determine their merits. This is completely anecdotal, but these days I honestly can’t even find the answer if I click on a Quora result on a searc…

Yeah, I've noticed this too: seeing a Quora question that's exactly what I'm looking for, clicking it, and not actually finding the question which the SERP said was there. At least this used to happen back when I actually got Quora results, I'm not sure if its search ranking has dropped or if Quora results get caught by my banner blindness these days.

There are some sites which will generate a bunch of pages which show up in Google searches but which are really just site searches. You google a thing, and a site pops up with a page called "Articles about the thing", but when you go there you see it's just a site search for "the thing". I wonder if Quora is doing something similar? Maybe the question doesn't actually exist, and the page in the Google search result is just a disguised search page?

Re: AI Ruined Quora

#63

Post by karpovv-boris »

cornholio wrote: post #60

The post shows limited understanding of what LLMs are. Ok, so Quora has a bad model that generates "Why doesn't Donald Trump shave his mustache?" type questions. That's Quora's problem. But in general, a frontier LLMs like the ones trained by Open AI would not make such silly mistakes in their output. Its "fancy autocomplete" is trained on millions of documents that include detailed description of Trump's face and th…

The post shows no understanding of article structure or narrative skills. It’s garbage.

Re: AI Ruined Quora

#66

Post by wruza »

Zambyte wrote: post #31
svdr wrote: post #18

I always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.

But that's literally what it is. The only reason you can have dialog-like interactions with language models is because they have been trained with special "stop tokens" surrounding dialog, so the model can (generally) auto complete something that looks like a reasons, and then the inference engine can stop producing text when the model produces the stop token.

Or when it produces “\nYou:”. But that doesn’t matter much, since the value is in what happens in a dialog.

Re: AI Ruined Quora

#67

Post by Kon5ole »

svdr wrote: post #18

I always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.

I see LLM's as next-generation search. So much of everything created on the internet is useless, outdated, false or just irrelevant to the thing you want answered. It gets increasingly harder to find what you need to get your job done. A LLM can extract relevant information from the garbage pile faster than I can sift through various forums and mail threads via Google. The more I use it the more I feel that it's a greater step in information-finding than Google itself was when it launched.

You need a second source of actual truth to verify it, of course, but that's always the case anyway. For coding it's easy, the code works or it doesn't. Lawyers and such have a harder time when they use a LLM trained on "the internet", but one can imagine a LLM trained mostly on actual case histories and law texts doing much better for example.

Re: AI Ruined Quora

#69

Post by hwbunny »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #56
hwbunny wrote: post #16

Before AI there were a lot of shills on the site who deliberately gave answers that had nothing to do with reality. AI just sped up the process. And the answer the author of the article formulates has nothing to do with reality either.

I found this is a “marketing” technique, that I first encountered on LinkedIn Groups. A shill asks a specific question, which is then “answered” by a bunch of other shills, recommending some product. I remember answering a technical “question” on the Swift Language group, in LI. I gave a simple, accurate, answer to what I considered to be an earnest question about a basic dilemma. It was something that I knew all abo…

Linkedin also goes the quora way. Nope, it's not marketing, it's something else.
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