I think it’s simply that getting a direct answer is easier than reading different forums with different views and come up with your idea. That doesn’t mean people wants google search to stop searching. We have gemini, if I want to use gemini. I don’t get why everything has to be AI. We can have multiple tools, not everything out there are nails.
Nope. Plenty of people want this.
In the last few years I’ve seen plenty of cases where CS undergrad students get stumped if ChatGPT is unable to debug/explain a question to them. I’ve literally heard “idk because ChatGPT can’t explain this lisp code” as an excuse during office hours.
Before LLMs, there were also a significant amount of people who used GitHub issues/discord to ask simple application usage questions instead of Googling. There seems to be a significant decrease of people’s willingness to search for an answer regardless of AI tools existing.
I wonder if it has to do with weaker reading comprehension skills?
4Robato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Somehow I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion here.
I dislike a direct answer to things as it discourages understanding. What is the default memory allocation mechanism in glibc malloc? I could get the answer sbrk() and mmap() and call it a day, but I find understanding when it uses mmap instead of sbrk (since sbrk isn’t buma aware but mmap is) way more useful for future questions.
Meanwhile, Google adding a tab for AI search is helpful for people who want to use just AI search. It doesn’t take much away from people doing traditional web searches. Why be mad about this instead of the other true questionable decisions Google is doing?
4Robato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
First of all, as long as it doesn’t replace search I’m fine with more options, I don’t like when a company forces me stuff, that’s it. I just think this is pointing to a future where search disappears and I don’t quite like that.
You might dislike a direct answer but young people don’t. The design of the applications can encourage certain types of behaviors, can spread misinformation and promote racism as we have seen in many social media now.
Things like Instagram and TikTok stress me out by the speed they show content and I could conclude no one will use those but then you see the new generations and how they even listen to music there, just the chorus of a song and go to the next one. This way of consuming information is being promoted by how the apps are designed; it is no coincidence that depression is increasing among young people.
You can say that in principle people can use more responsibly this types of social media, but that’s not the reality when we have algorithms trying to maximize the time we spend on the phone. Also, how do you know that companies don’t add biases to LLMs? Turns out Gorg (the LLM on twitter) they have added to the prompt to not criticize Elon or Trump. That’s the current problems of LLMs is that we don’t have context and even if there is context, if you have to put effort into it people won’t do it. This happens to scientific articles where people never check the sources, imagine with other stuff…
I honestly like LLMs and I think they are fascinating and very useful in a lot of situations! And efforts like Perplexity gives me a bit more faith than google just throwing an LLM that suggests to eat rocks. And while you might see that eating rocks shouldn’t be done, there’s this bias that can be build behind any LLM that affects in a way that will be hard to avoid or notice. Same way current algorithms affects us more than we think they do and polarizes opinions.
I mean will see where this goes, I just want companies to take the matter serious.
ArcturusRoot@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Technology Connections posted a very great video about this recently. Algorithms are breaking how people think and lulling them into complacency, losing the ability to think, research, discern. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA