Assuming this AI shit doesn’t kill us all and we make it to the conclusion that robots writing lies on websites perhaps isn’t the best thing for the internet, there’s gonna be a giant hole of like 10 years where you just shouldn’t trust anything written online. Someone’s gonna make a bespoke search engine that automatically excludes searching for anything from 2023 to 2035.
Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I eat out and lately overhearing some people talking about how they find shit with ChatGPT, and it’s not a good sign.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
MBech@feddit.dk 1 week ago
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.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I believe DuckDuckGo is just as bad. I think they changed their search to match Google. I’m not sure if you are allowed to exclude search terms, use quotes, etc.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I had a song intermittently stuck in my head for over a decade, couldn’t remember the artist, song name, or any of the lyrics. I only had the genre, language it was in, and a vague, memory-degraded description of a music video. Over the years I’d tried to find it on search engines a bunch of times to no avail, using every prompt I could think of. ChatGPT got it in one. So yeah, it’s very useful for stuff like that. Was a great feeling to scratch that itch after so long. But I wouldn’t trust an LLM with anything important.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
LLM are good at certain things, especially involving language (unsurprisingly). They’re tools. They’re not the be-all-end-all like a lot of tech bros proselytize them as, but they are useful if you know their limitations
If you use them properly, they can be a valuable addition to one’s search for information. The problem is that I don’t think most users use them properly.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
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 1 week ago
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research.
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 1 week 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).
BigBenis@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I was chatting with some folks the other day and somebody was going on about how they had gotten asymptomatic long-COVID from the vaccine. When asked about her sources her response was that AI had pointed her to studies and you could viscerally feel everybody else’s cringe.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The hell even is that? Asymptomatic means no symptoms. Long-COVID isn’t a contagious thing, it’s literally a description of the symptoms you have from having COVID and the long term effects.
God that makes my freaking blood boil.
Damn @BigBenis@lemmy.world that was a hell of a conversation you we having.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
“Cool, send me the actual studies.”
*crickets*