Delta_V@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
this sounds like what Google wanted to be since its inception: ask a question, get an answer
somewhere along the journey, the reality of needing to make money drove the enshitification of search results: ask a question, get offers to sell you an answer
this seems like a step in a better direction
baggins@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Right because when I search for factual information what I really want is an LLM to tell me “sorry Dave I can’t answer that question right now.” (See: any election related information. As in it doesn’t just kick you back to the web search results it just straight up refuses to give you the answer.)
Thistlewick@lemmynsfw.com 16 hours ago
It baffles me how wholly some people are just accepting the complete erosion of the internet. I have lecturers at university, so theoretically educated people, who tell us point blank to plug any questions we have about weekly topics into ChatGPT. The respect I have for these teachers and their content is less than zero at this point.
baggins@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Lmao I’d be going to their office hours with a list of questions just for that
i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 15 hours ago
Then you have to check those answers, so you need to search for an authoritative source anyway… which means you need a regular search engine. At that point you may as well have used the search engine on the first place.
If Google does this, you’ll need to find an alternative search engine to check Google against… so you may as well just switch to a different search engine in the first place.
There are things that LLMs are good at, being a search engine isn’t one of them. Although I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using, so they can be useful as a supplementary search tool. I’d rather that than it just giving the answers, which then need to be fact checked elsewhere.
uranibaba@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I was going to respond to this but I think you did so yourself:
I think they work as supplements and not replacements. As any tool, they have their use and (for me) can enhance my searching. But I would not replace it with only LLM. (Altough I have never had any great luck with ChatGPT and links, they never work - as in ChatGPT give me an anchor element without any link. It’s better at providing me search terms and concepts to look up for what I need.)