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Generative AI could make search harder to trust

wired.com

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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#71

Post by zpeti »

Here's what people don't understand: this is mostly good for google.

The worse organic results are, the more people will click on paid links. This is WHY everyone on HN is complaining about search results, because google doesn't really have an incentive to give you really good results. They only need to be good enough to keep 95% of the population still using google, but mostly expecting the good results to be ads.

Google ads are the equivalent of verification on FB and X. They just call it something different. The verified, high quality results will be paid.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#72

Post by klyrs »

icyberbullyu wrote: post #63
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…

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.

My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic similarity. Notably, you can no longer put a sentence in quotes to only find pages that contain that exact phrase. Also, the order of words matters more now than it used to (where the old search engines treated a space as AND, so order was irrelevant outside of quotes)

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#73

Post by stevenwoo »

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.

One thing I've noticed about simple one word searches on Bing now - a lot of times it just errors out and closes the Bing app tab you've opened with no explanation to the user. This only started happening after they pushed the AI driven search narrative to make you use it in the app, so apparently single word searches are too much somehow for their version of AI to handle.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#74

Post by klyrs »

faizshah wrote: post #37

I started to go down a line of thinking where I think we might see a return to books in the next 3-5 years. The reason is that with a book it’s a big collection of knowledge and people can post reviews about the quality of the book whereas on the web you have no way of knowing what quality of an article will be anymore.

Only, amazon is now flooded with crapbooks written by artificial psychonauts and also reviews written by artificial psychonauts.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#75

Post by crispycas12 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #69

Why are people calling them hallucinations and not just errors, flaws or bugs? You can't hallucinate if all of your perception is one internal state. Chatbots don't dream of electric sheep.

Personally, I think confabulations would be a better term. To the best of my understanding, these AI rely on a model similar to the reconstructive theory of memory in humans. The connotation of the word confabulation indicates no maliciousness while highlighting the erroneous nature of the action.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#76

Post by robinsonb5 »

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

I suspect in the coming years the Wayback Machine at archive.org will become ever more important - always assuming it's not lost as collateral damage in their copyright battles. Indexing that dataset and making it searchable would massively increase its value.

My inner conspiracy theorist can't help wonder if the continued reduction in search usefulness isn't part of an ongoing deliberate disempowerment of everyday people - but my rational side says it's merely an unfortunate emergent behaviour of the systems we've built.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#77

Post by [deleted] »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #61
dredmorbius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate. At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine. Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.

The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.

[deleted]

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#80

Post by robinsonb5 »

lazide wrote: post #23
LikelyABurner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find a plethora of critical viewpoints on Hacker News and the various blogs it links to which are well cognizant of the dangers of the tech industry. The problem isn’t that Wired is critical, it’s that they’ve gone weirdly reactionary and their writing has gone so mass market dumbed down that Some Random Guy’s Blog is likely to have a better written and researched viewpoint.

They probably laid off almost everyone but some burnt out interns.

Plot twist: maybe the article was written by ChatGPT!
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