• ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Ok.

    > uses search engine

    > search engine gives generative AI answer

    God dammit

    > scroll down

    > click search result

    > AI Generated article

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      7 months ago

      > search engine gives generative AI answer

      > It cites it source, so can’t be that bad right?

      > click link to source

      > It’s an AI generated article

      Oh no.

    • dance_ninja@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The uncertainty has gripped the world in fear. I go to hug my wife for comfort. She is cakeGen AI.

    • Mose13@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Don’t be ridiculous. It’s more like Google search result you click is an ad rather than an organic search result, and that ad… is an ad that’s ai generated… god damnit

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Maybe go to more than 2 places for your information? I agree that this shit is also an issue with news and other media, but it’s not that hard to find more substantial information on things. At least not yet.

      And I can’t remember the exact process off hand, but there’s still a way to get search results without that garbage on google. I’ll edit if I can find it.


      *Found it. So, at least for Firefox, you can add a custom search engine through the settings. For the url, input https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 and then set it as your default se if you want. As far as I can tell, it’s a simplified version of the main search, just without the “helpful” add-ons. Hope it helps some people.

      **For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        **For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.

        The URL as shown is actually valid. No worries there.

        The value 25 happens to be hexidecimal for a percent sign. The percent symbol is reserved in URLs for encoding special characters (e.g. %20 is a space), so a bare percent sign must be represented by %25. Lemmy must be parsing your URL and normalizing it for the rest of us.

    • M137@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Ok.

      > uses search engine

      > search engine gives generative AI answer

      > stops using that search engine

      That’s all you have to do, it’s not hard. I’m absolutely certain that people really want to have things that annoy them and makes them feel bad just so they can complain and get attention from that complaining. This is the same as people complaining about ads online and then doing nothing to fix that, it’s the same with many things.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.

    Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.

    • GaiusBaltar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      To be fair, humans were already diluting it in a great sea of excrement, the robots just came to take our job and do it even faster and better.

    • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I mean google was already like this before GenAI.

      Its a nightmare to find anything you’re actually looking for and not SEO spam.

      Gen AI cuts out some of that noise but it has its own problems too.

      • JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You’d have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.

        And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.

        • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Oh yeah I remember the AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Dogpile days. I agree searxh has come a long way. I’m just saying Google used to be better in that old sweet spot.

    • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.

      Bruh did you ever went to 4chan or Reddit? The Internet turned to a dumpster fire long time before AI.

        • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It’s still part of the Internet, if you can just pick and choose what Parts we are talking about, then the Internet ist still fine 🥸

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            But now all of the internet got incorporated into a magic 8-ball and when it gives you it’s random bullshit, you don’t know is it quoting anon from 4chan or a scientific paper or a journal or random assortment of words. And you don’t have any way to check it in confines of the system

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”

    The absolute gall of this woman to blame her own negligence and incompetence on a tool she grossly misused.

  • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Information is not truth. A do or die slogan for the 21st century.

    • Oka@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      I ask GPT for random junk all the time. If it’s important, I’ll double-check the results. I take any response with a grain of salt, though.

      • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You are spending more time and effort doing that than you would googling old fashioned way. And if you don’t check, you might as well throwing magic 8-ball, less damage to the environment, same accuracy

        • Oka@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          The latest GPT does search the internet to generate a response, so it’s currently a middleman to a search engine.

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            No it doesn’t. It incorporates unknown number of words from the internet into a machine which only purpose is to sound like a human. It’s an insanely complicated machine, but the truthfulness of the response not only never considered, but also is impossible to take as a deaired result.
            And the fact that so many people aren’t equipped to recognise it behind the way it talks could be buffling, but also very consistent with other choices humanity takes regularly.

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            And some of those citations and quotes will be completely false and randomly generated, but they will sound very believable, so you don’t know truth from random fiction until you check every single one of them. At which point you should ask yourself why did you add unneccessary step of burning small portion of the rainforest to ask random word generator for stuff, when you could not do that and look for sources directly, saving that much time and energy

            • PapstJL4U@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I, too, get the feeling, that the RoI is not there with LLM. Being able to include “site:” or “ext:” are more efficient.

              I just made another test: Kaba, just googling kaba gets you a german wiki article, explaining it means KAkao + BAnana

              chatgpt: It is the combination of the first syllables of KAkao and BEutel - Beutel is bag in german.

              It just made up the important part. On top of chatgpt says Kaba is a famous product in many countries, I am sure it is not.

              • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                LLMs are great at cutting through noise

                Even that is not true. It doesn’t have aforementioned criteria for truth, you can’t make it have one.
                LLMs are great at generating noise that humans have hard time distinguishing from a text. Nothing else. There are indeed applications for it, but due to human nature, people think that since the text looks like something coherent, information contained will also be reliable, which is very, very dangerous.

              • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                You do have this issue, you can’t not have this issue, your LLM, no matter how big the model is and how much tooling you use, does not have criteria for truth. The fact that you made this invisible for you is worse, so much worse.

      • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        So, if it isn’t important, you just want an answer, and you don’t care whether it’s correct or not?

        • 0oWow@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The same can be said about the search results. For search results, you have to use your brain to determine what is correct and what is not. Now imagine for a moment if you were to use those same brain cells to determine if the AI needs a check.

          AI is just another way to process the search results, that happens to give you the correct answer up front, most of the time. If you go blindly trust it, that’s on you.

            • 0oWow@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              If you knew what the sources were, you wouldn’t have needed to search in the first place. Just because it’s on a reputable website does not make it legit. You still have to reason.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    And when the search engines shove it in your faces and try to make it so we HAVE to use it for searches to justify their stupid expenses?

  • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.

    LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Ok but may I point you to the reality that internet spread misinformation is a critically bad problem at the moment

      • RDSM@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        And your argument is that a human will be better than an AI going through that? Because it seems unrelated to the initial argument.

  • Kaelygon@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Google search results are often completely unrelated so it’s not any better. If the thing I’m looking for is obscure, AI often finds some thread that I can follow, but I always double check that information.
    Know your tool limits, after hundreds of prompts I’ve learned pretty well when the AI is spitting bullshit answers. Real people on the internet can be just as wrong and biased, so it’s best to find multiple independent sources

  • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    I’ve used it for very, very specific cases. I’m on Kagi, so it’s a built in feature (that isn’t intrusive), and it typically generates great answers. That is, unless I’m getting into something obscure. I’ve used it less than five times, all in all.

  • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Generative AI is a tool, sometimes is useful, sometimes it’s not useful. If you want a recipe for pancakes you’ll get there a lot quicker using ChatGPT than using Google. It’s also worth noting that you can ask tools like ChatGPT for it’s references.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      It’s also worth noting that you can ask tools like ChatGPT for it’s references.

      last time I tried that it made up links that didn’t work, and then it admitted that it cannot reference anything because of not having access to the internet

      • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        That’s my point, if the model returns a hallucinated source you can probably disregard it’s output. But if the model provides an accurate source you can verify it’s output. Depending on the information you’re researching, this approach can be much quicker than using Google. Out of interest, have you experienced source hallucinations on ChatGPT recently (last few weeks)? I have not experienced source hallucinations in a long time.

        • 31337@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          I use GPT (4o, premium) a lot, and yes, I still sometimes experience source hallucinations. It also will sometimes hallucinate incorrect things not in the source. I get better results when I tell it not to browse. The large context of processing web pages seems to hurt its “performance.” I would never trust gen AI for a recipe. I usually just use Kagi to search for recipes and have it set to promote results from recipe sites I like.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldBanned
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      7 months ago

      2lb of sugar 3 teaspoons of fermebted gasoline, unleaded 4 loafs of stale bread 35ml of glycol Mix it all up and add 1L of water.

      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        Do you also drive off a bridge when your navigator tells you to? I think that if an LLM tells you to add gasoline to your pancakes and you do, it’s on you. Common sense doesn’t seem very common nowdays.

        • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldBanned
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          7 months ago

          Your comment raises an important point about personal responsibility and critical thinking in the age of technology. Here’s how I would respond:

          Acknowledging Personal Responsibility

          You’re absolutely right that individuals must exercise judgment when interacting with technology, including language models (LLMs). Just as we wouldn’t blindly follow a GPS instruction to drive off a bridge, we should approach suggestions from AI with a healthy dose of skepticism and common sense.

          The Role of Critical Thinking

          In our increasingly automated world, critical thinking is essential. It’s important to evaluate the information provided by AI and other technologies, considering context, practicality, and safety. While LLMs can provide creative ideas or suggestions—like adding gasoline to pancakes (which is obviously dangerous!)—it’s crucial to discern what is sensible and safe.

          Encouraging Responsible Use of Technology

          Ultimately, it’s about finding a balance between leveraging technology for assistance and maintaining our own decision-making capabilities. Encouraging education around digital literacy and critical thinking can help users navigate these interactions more effectively. Thank you for bringing up this thought-provoking topic! It’s a reminder that while technology can enhance our lives, we must remain vigilant and responsible in how we use it.

          Related

          What are some examples…lol