I can’t really fault them for it tbh. Google has gotten so fucking bad over the last 10 years. Half of the results are just ads that don’t necesarily have anything to do with your search.
Sure, use something else like Duckduckgo, but when you’re already switching, why not switch to something that tends to be right 95% of the time, and where you don’t need to be good at keywords, and can just write a paragraph of text and it’ll figure out what you’re looking for. If you’re actually researching something you’re bound to look at the sources anyway, instead of just what the LLM writes.
The ease of access of LLMs, and the complete and utter enshittyfication of Google is why so many people choose an LLM.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Was it really “like that” for any length of time? To me it seems like most people just believed whatever bullshit they saw on Facebook/Twitter/Insta/Reddit, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to have so many bots pushing political content there. Before the internet it would be reading some random book/magazine you found, and before then it was hearsay from a relative.
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research. It doesn’t matter if it’s thru a library, or a search engine, or Wikipedia sources, or AI sources, as long as you read the actual source you’ll be fine; if you didn’t want to do that it was always easy to stumble upon misinfo or disinfo anyways.
One actual problem that AI might cause is if the actual scientists doing the research start using it without due diligence. People are definitely using LLMs to help them write/structure the papers ¹ but if they actually use it to “help” with methodology or other content… Then we would indeed be in trouble, given how confidently incorrect LLM output can be.
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yes, but that number is getting smaller. Where I live, most households rarely have a full bookshelf, and instead nearly every member of the family has a “smart” phone; they’ll grab the chance to use anything that would be easier than spending hours going through a lot of books. I do sincerely hope methods of doing good research are still continually being taught, including the ability to distinguish good information from bad.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Internet (via your smartphone) provides you with the ability to find any book, magazine or paper on any subject you want, for free (if you’re willing to sail under the right flag), within seconds. Of course noone has a full bookshelf anymore, the only reason to want physical books nowadays is sentimentality or some very specific old book that hasn’t been digitized yet (but in that case you won’t have it on your bookshelf and will have to go to the library anyway). The fastest and most accurate way of doing research today is getting a gist on Wikipedia, clicking through the source links and reading those, and combing through arxiv and scihub for anything relevant. If you are unfamiliar with the subject as a whole, you download the relevant book and read it. Of course noone wants to comb through physical books anymore, it’s a complete waste of time (provided of course they have been digitized).