For the average consumer of AI, it’s a novelty at this point, even tho we have been using pieces parts of AI for a long while now. But it’s getting it’s stride in stuff like face swaps, neat tiktok videos, making weird pictures. I liken it to when ‘the cloud’ came to town. Hell, we’ve been uploading to servers and running apps on servers for a long while before ‘the cloud’ happened. Everyone and their brother trampled each other to move their entire operations to the cloud. Then, as the dust all settled, we started realizing that not everything that could be in the cloud, should be in the cloud, and so things got back to normal. But just the words ‘the cloud’ made CEOs jizz their pants at one time.
Sameie, sameie with AI. It’s a selling point. There was a thread here I believe, talking about an AI rice cooker. The ‘AI’ part sells it, even tho we’ve been making excellent rice for millennia. I use AI. I find it a faster way to cut through all the searches and give bulleted points to deviate from. I realize that it’s not best practice to rely on AI’s word, but use it as a springboard into further investigation.
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
There are various levels of AI here
Storing embeddings/vectors in a search index can make your searches smarter and more relevant. The embeddings squeeze related concepts closer together than pure keyword approaches, which if done well increases retrieval quality.
RAG tools and AI searches are just a layer on top of your index. When done well these can be really useful in annotating your results and speeding up finding things.
That’s useful when you’re searching say an error message and the AI is able to iterate on keywords and skim a Guthub issue about it and skip to the resolution.
Similarly it’s good when you’re researching something but don’t have the exact words, AI search can iterate and capture your intent, then run several queries based on that.
I don’t find the hallucination problem significant in practice with a lot of AI search tools, but I have found AI is vulnerable to certain types of SEO spam that a human would never fall for.
As an example most companies have a “comparison to” or “alternatives to” blogpost. The AI does not critically look at the fact that a service is hosting a blogpost shilling their own product. So asking search AI for options is actually poor quality because it will return the shilled results that appear in search first.
AI also search adds an additional silent layer of filtering, which you need to be conscious of.
rebelflesh@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
But is a search engine we actually figured those out a few years ago, what advantage is AI going to bring? Do we also need ai wheels now?
This is the smart thing all over again, I don’t need a smart toilet or a smart toothbrush.