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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#891

Post by wpietri »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #651
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

You're right, this is a key question:

> Who Gets To Decide What Is True?

For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also responsible for what they say. But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker.

I think we have a number of historical models for that. A relevant one is divination. If you bring your question to the haruspex, your answer is read out of the guts of a sacrificed animal. If the answer is wrong, who do you blame? The traditional answer is the gods, or perhaps nobody.

Bu we know now that fortune tellers are just selling answers while pretending to not be responsible for them. Which points us at one solution: anybody selling or presenting LLM output as meaningful is legally responsible for the quality of the product.

Unfortunately, another model is the modern corporation. Sometimes the people in a company intentionally lie. More often, statements are made by one person based on a vision or optimism or confusion or bullshit. Nobody set out to lie, but nobody really cared about the truth, at least not as much as everybody cared about making money.

So I'd agree that the government doesn't have much role in deciding The Truth. Similarly, the government shouldn't have much role in controlling what you eat. But in both cases, I think there's plenty of role for the government in ensuring that companies selling good food or good information have sound production and quality control measures to ensure that they are delivering what consumers are expecting.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#892

Post by wpietri »

komali2 wrote: post #864
the__alchemist wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)

Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context. The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.

Not sure if that's better or worse than a developer doing basically the same thing because they could make a little money.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#893

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

marckrn wrote: post #295

OpenAI also provides a Chrome Extension ( https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-search/ejcf... ) to trigger a search from the omnibar as the default search engine. If you don't like that (like I do), you can also manually add it under Site Search using https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&hints=search

How did you find the extension? Searching the Chrome Web Store for 'SearchGPT' turns up a ton of third-party extensions, not made by OpenAI. Also, there doesn't appear to be a way to search by developer.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#894

Post by Forgeties79 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #651
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

I don’t know who should get to decide “what is true” but I think we all agree that we won’t get anything remotely akin to truth so long as search is driven by for-profit interests trying to steer us towards their products first and our actual query (a distant) second.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#895

Post by Kiro »

mcpar-land wrote: post #855
GolfPopper wrote: post #602

Every time I see one of these topics, I go ask chat GPT a question to which I know the answer on a topic where I would like to be able to get useful answers to similar questions that I do not know the answer to. This time it was, "Did Paul Edwin Zimmer write a fourth Dark Border novel?" (Real answer: Yes, Ingulf the Mad . You can find the answer on his Wikipedia page.[1]) ChatGPT's[2] answer: "Yes, Paul Edwin Zimmer…

A lot of these responses are so funny. "Um, when _I_ asked this question to ChatGPT it gave the right answer!" Yeah, because it's flaky! It doesn't give the same answer every time! That's the worst possible outcome!

Normally I would agree with you but for such a fuzzy topic involving search it would require all pages and discussions it can find to be the same and not outdated. I don't see why anyone would presume these systems to be omnipotent.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#896

Post by GuB-42 »

whizzter wrote: post #300

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over a…

> This is probably Google's Altavista moment

Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware.

As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard.

It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade.

What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#897

Post by uoaei »

Let the age of AI-SEO begin.

This won't fix any issues with existing search, it will just make new forms of the same decaying cruft we're used to.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#898

Post by agumonkey »

jumping_frog wrote: post #881
agumonkey wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask myself why did we accept pre 2010s answers, maybe because the media institutions had accumulated enough trust ? I feel this unavoidable.. nothing is true unless there's a threshold of quality/verification in place across the system.

The media was lying all the time. It didn't start lying just after advent of social media. Just look at sitcoms like Yes Minister. The reason we now consider media to lie is because their lies are exposed, documented, tracked and refreshed to remind users not to trust them blindly.

Understood but who is not lying. Now it went from a semi lying central agent to lots of distributed churches all believing their own partial view .. to me it's worse

Re: ChatGPT Search

#899

Post by electrondood »

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

> Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information?

LLMs have already fundamentally changed our relationship to information.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#900

Post by bradjohnson »

llm_trw wrote: post #692
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic innovator’s dilemma. The politics of Google make launching a search competitor impossible.

One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.

Eh, Zuck did the same with Instagram/Facebook: “If we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”
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