i think the point is that the answer is not reliable. it might be completely correct or borderline wrong, or something in between, and there’s no way to tell without verifying everything it says - and then one could look it up oneself in the first place already.
Im no fan of generative ai, but this argument drives me crazy, there are a lot of things that are easy to verify but hard to come up with, quite famously in fact.
Honestly? It’s a great place to start, especially with every search engine being worse than anything pre-2018
I used to have to post my error codes to a forum if googling them didn’t immediately get my anywhere and pray someone would reply something actually useful some day
Now I can ask ChatGPT to point me at something and go from there. If it assumes wrongly about anything I can correct it rather simply. Its really good at turning documentation written by somebody who hasn’t spoken to another human in 15 years into something my stupid ass can better understand, too
AI is a powerful as shit tool, people who slag it as not having any utility are about as ignorant as the people saying it’s the second coming of Jesus himself
I’m personally planning to host a local model to avoid supporting commercial shit, but that’s a project for down the line rn
The main problem I see is that Google just shouldn’t include AI results. And they definitely shouldn’t put their unreliable LLM front and center on the results page. When you google something, you want accurate information, which the LLM might have, but only if that data was readily available to begin with. So the stuff it can help with is stuff the search would put first already.
For anything requiring critical thought or research, the LLM will often hallucinate or misrepresent. The danger is that people do not always apply critical thinking. Defaulting to showing an LLM response is extremely dangerous, and it’s basically pointless.
I don’t know. I find it to be a helpful tool. There’s definitely times it’s wrong (very very wrong sometimes) and there’s sometimes it’s right. It’s up to the user to figure that out.
Maybe I’m old and cynical, but I don’t take anything I read on the Internet, especially something automatically generated, at face value. It’s just another tool I could use to help get to the answer I’m looking for.
I agree with you, and I use it that same way. But I think it should be something the user explicitly seeks out. The problem is that everyone who uses Google now unintentionally use an LLM in the exact same way they’ve always found human-written content. It’s fundamentally different content, so shoving it into the existing interface is begging for confusion.
While I’m not the person you replied to and don’t know what their argument would be, I’ll take a shot at giving my own answer. In many cases when people post examples of AI giving unhelpful or bad information, there’s often someone who runs off to their favorite LLM to see if it gives a better result, and it usually does, so it gets treated like user error for using the wrong LLM or not wording the prompt properly. When in other examples that person’s favorite LLM which gave the correct answer this time, is the bad example hallucinating or mixing unrelated concepts, and other people are in the comments promoting other LLMs that gave them a good reply this time. None of the LLMs are actually trustworthy consistently enough to be trusted alone, and you won’t really know what answer is trustworthy unless you ask several LLMs and then go research the topic on your own anyway to figure out which answer is the most correct. It’s a valid point that ChatGPT got the answer more right than Gemini this time, but it’s somewhat useless to know that because other times ChatGPT is the one hallucinating wildly, and Gemini has the right answer, but since they’ve all been wrong before who do you trust.
LLMs are like asking an arrogant person who thinks they know everything, who rather than admitting what they don’t know, will pull an answer out of their butt, and while it might be a logical answer, it isn’t based in reality, and may still be wildly wrong. If you already mostly know the answer, maybe asking the arrogant person works, because you already know enough to know if they are speaking from their actual knowledge or making up an answer, but if you don’t already have knowledge on a topic, you won’t know whether the arrogant person is giving useful information or not.
It’s a tool, if you misuse a tool you can get hurt, if you use it right it can make your task easier. Ultimately it will likely cause problems in the future but the answer is easy, stop using Google and move to another search engine. You won’t get the responses from Googles ai then. Enough people do so, Google will change it maybe.
it’s still a crapshoot and therefore useless.
Could you be a little more constructive and point me at the points that are wrong and useless?
Thank you.
i think the point is that the answer is not reliable. it might be completely correct or borderline wrong, or something in between, and there’s no way to tell without verifying everything it says - and then one could look it up oneself in the first place already.
Im no fan of generative ai, but this argument drives me crazy, there are a lot of things that are easy to verify but hard to come up with, quite famously in fact.
Same as most human iterations then?
At least I fact check everything I read. Like I did with this post and the church of the anti-AI got angry they got fact checked.
i didn’t get angry, that was the other guys. just trying to explain it rationally
If you’re using AI verbatim without looking up answers and verifying results, then that’s on you.
When you Google something, do you take the first result and just assume it’s fact? You shouldn’t for AI either.
If you’re going to do the research anyway, why bother with AI?
Honestly? It’s a great place to start, especially with every search engine being worse than anything pre-2018
I used to have to post my error codes to a forum if googling them didn’t immediately get my anywhere and pray someone would reply something actually useful some day
Now I can ask ChatGPT to point me at something and go from there. If it assumes wrongly about anything I can correct it rather simply. Its really good at turning documentation written by somebody who hasn’t spoken to another human in 15 years into something my stupid ass can better understand, too
AI is a powerful as shit tool, people who slag it as not having any utility are about as ignorant as the people saying it’s the second coming of Jesus himself
I’m personally planning to host a local model to avoid supporting commercial shit, but that’s a project for down the line rn
If you are going to cite textbooks anyway, why would you bother with a search engine?
The main problem I see is that Google just shouldn’t include AI results. And they definitely shouldn’t put their unreliable LLM front and center on the results page. When you google something, you want accurate information, which the LLM might have, but only if that data was readily available to begin with. So the stuff it can help with is stuff the search would put first already.
For anything requiring critical thought or research, the LLM will often hallucinate or misrepresent. The danger is that people do not always apply critical thinking. Defaulting to showing an LLM response is extremely dangerous, and it’s basically pointless.
I don’t know. I find it to be a helpful tool. There’s definitely times it’s wrong (very very wrong sometimes) and there’s sometimes it’s right. It’s up to the user to figure that out.
Maybe I’m old and cynical, but I don’t take anything I read on the Internet, especially something automatically generated, at face value. It’s just another tool I could use to help get to the answer I’m looking for.
I agree with you, and I use it that same way. But I think it should be something the user explicitly seeks out. The problem is that everyone who uses Google now unintentionally use an LLM in the exact same way they’ve always found human-written content. It’s fundamentally different content, so shoving it into the existing interface is begging for confusion.
The part where it gives random results of varying quality, sparky.
In my experience it’s still consistently better than Google for anything specific
Trying to get free product improvement ideas?
Pay us first.
Yep, you caught me. I’m OpenAI CEO.
While I’m not the person you replied to and don’t know what their argument would be, I’ll take a shot at giving my own answer. In many cases when people post examples of AI giving unhelpful or bad information, there’s often someone who runs off to their favorite LLM to see if it gives a better result, and it usually does, so it gets treated like user error for using the wrong LLM or not wording the prompt properly. When in other examples that person’s favorite LLM which gave the correct answer this time, is the bad example hallucinating or mixing unrelated concepts, and other people are in the comments promoting other LLMs that gave them a good reply this time. None of the LLMs are actually trustworthy consistently enough to be trusted alone, and you won’t really know what answer is trustworthy unless you ask several LLMs and then go research the topic on your own anyway to figure out which answer is the most correct. It’s a valid point that ChatGPT got the answer more right than Gemini this time, but it’s somewhat useless to know that because other times ChatGPT is the one hallucinating wildly, and Gemini has the right answer, but since they’ve all been wrong before who do you trust.
LLMs are like asking an arrogant person who thinks they know everything, who rather than admitting what they don’t know, will pull an answer out of their butt, and while it might be a logical answer, it isn’t based in reality, and may still be wildly wrong. If you already mostly know the answer, maybe asking the arrogant person works, because you already know enough to know if they are speaking from their actual knowledge or making up an answer, but if you don’t already have knowledge on a topic, you won’t know whether the arrogant person is giving useful information or not.
It’s a tool, if you misuse a tool you can get hurt, if you use it right it can make your task easier. Ultimately it will likely cause problems in the future but the answer is easy, stop using Google and move to another search engine. You won’t get the responses from Googles ai then. Enough people do so, Google will change it maybe.