Comment on Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder

squaresinger@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Enkers@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’d say they at least give more immediately useful info. I’ve got to scroll past 5-8 sponsored results and then the next top results are AI generated garbage anyways.

  Even though I think he’s mostly right, the AI techbro gameplan is obvious. Position yourself as a better alternative to Google search, burn money by the barrelful to capture the market, then begin enshitification.

  In fact, enshitification has already begun because; responses are comparatively expensive to generate. The more users they onboard, the more they have to scale back the quality of those responses.

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  • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    ChatGPT is already getting worse at code commenting and programming.

    The problem is that enshitification is basically a requirement in a capitalist economy.

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• sab@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Even if AI magically got to the point of providing accurate and good results, I would still profoundly object to using it.

  First, it's a waste of resources. The climate impact of AI is enough of a reason why we should leave it dead until we live in a world with limitless energy and water.

  Second, I don't trust a computer to select my sources for me. Sometimes you might have to go through a few pages, but with traditional search engines at least you are presented with a variety of sources and you can use your god given ability of critical thinking.

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  • RatherBeMTB@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The climate change has become the new CP go to argument to condone the stupidest reasoning. Just like blocking Torrent sites to prevent CP, let’s block AI to prevent climate change.

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  • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t trust a computer to select my sources for me.

    I’m not sure what you think modern search engines do, but this is pretty much it. Hell, all of the popular ones have been using AI signals for years.

    You can request as many sources from an AI as you would get from Google.

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    • sab@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I'm checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though.

      But absolutely, it's not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.

      Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.

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  • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s LLMs, which is what is necessary for Chat-AI (the first “L” in there quite literally stands for Large).

    Remove the stuff necessary to process natural human language and those things tend to be way smaller, especially if they’re just trained using the user’s own actions.

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• ribboo@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean most top searches are AI generated bullshit nowadays anyway. Adding Reddit to a search is basically the only decent way to get a proper answer. But those answers are not much more reliable than ChatGPT. You have to use the same sort of skepticism and fact checking regardless.

  Google has really gotten horrible over the years.

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  • SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Most of the results after the first page on Google are usually the same as the usable results, just mirrored on some shady site full of ads and malware.

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• twinnie@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I already go to ChatGPT more than Google. If you pay for it then the latest version can access the internet and if it doesn’t know the answer to something it’ll search the internet for you. Sometimes I come across a large clickbait page and I just give ChatGPT the link and tell it to get the information from it for me.

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  • madnificent@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do you fact-check the answers?

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    • dependencyInjection@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It depends what you’re using it for as to whether you need to fact check stuff.

      I’m a software developer and if I can’t remember how to do an inner join in SQL then I can easier ask ChatGPT to do it for me and I will know if it is right or not as this is my field of expertise.

      If I’m asking it how to perform open heart surgery on my cat, then sure I’m probably going to want several second opinions as that is not my area of expertise.

      When using a calculator do you use two different calculators to check that the first one isn’t lying?

      Also, you made a massive assumption that the stuff OP was using it for was something that warranted fact checking.

      I can see why you would use it. Why would I want to search Google for inner joins sql when it is going to give me so many false links that don’t give me the info in need in a concise manner.

      Even time wasting searches have just been ruined. Example: Top Minecraft Java seeds 1.20. Will give me pages littered with ads or the awful page 1-10 that you must click through.

      Many websites are literally unusable at this point and I use ad blockers and things like consent-o-matic. But there are still pop up ads, sub to our newsletter, scam ads etc. so much so that I’ll just leave the site and forego learning the new thing I wanted to learn.

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    • Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s pretty trivial to fact check an answer… You should start using this kind of bots more. Check perplexity.ai for a free version

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      • GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s pretty trivial to fact check an answer

        People don't do it though and often parrot bullshit.

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      • madnificent@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Perplexity.ai has been my go to for this reason.

        It often brings up bad solutions to a problem and checking the sources it references shows it regulary misses the gist of these sources.

        There sources it selects are often not the ones I end up using. They are starting point, but not the best starting point.

        What it is good for is for finding content when I don’t know the terminology of the domain. It is a starting point ready to lead me astray with exquisitely written content.

        Find trustworthy sources and use them.

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    • Steeve@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The new release of GPT-4 searches Bing, reads the results, summarizes, and provides sources, so it’s easier to fact check than ever if you need to.

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  • kubica@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When I tried it it was never able to give me the sources of what it said. And it has given me way too many made up answers to just trust it without reasons. Having to search for sources after it said something has made me skip the part the middle man(machine).

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    • Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You probably tried the free version. Check perplexity.ai to see how the paid version of chatgpt works. Every source is referenced and linked.

      This guy is not talking about the current version of free chatgpt. He’s talking of the much better tools that will be available in the next few years

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      • squaresinger@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah, because people selling AI products have a great track record on predicting how their products will develop in the future. Because of that, Teslas don’t have steering wheels any more, because Full Self Driving drives people incident-free from New York to California since 2017.

        The thing with AI development is, that it rapidly gets to 50% of the desired solution, but then gets stuck there, not being able to get consistently good enough that you can actually rely on it.

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  • Baines@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    give it time, algos will fuck those results as well

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    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They'll need to make money with a cheap cost-per-sale, so they'll put ads on the site. Then they'll put promoted content in the AI chat, but it's okay because they'll say it's promoted. Eventually it won't even say it's promoted and it will just be all ads, just like every other tech company.

      Why? Because monetization leads directly to enshittification, because the users stop being the customers.

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  • madnificent@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do you fact-check the answers?

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    • Redredme@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s such a strange question. It’s almost like you imply that Google results do not need fact checking.

      They do. Everything found online does.

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      • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        With google, it depends on what webpage you end up on. Some require more checking than others, which are more trustworthy

        Generative AI can hallucinate about anything

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      • madnificent@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Agree.

        I found it more tempting to accept the initial answers I got from GPT4 (and derivatives) because they are so well written. I know there are more like me.

        With the advent of working LLMs, reference manuals should gain importance too. I check them more often than before because LLMs have forced me to. Could be very positive.

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  • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    ChatGPT powers Bing Chat, which can access the internet and find answers for you, no purchase necessary (if you’re not on edge, you might need to install a browser extension to access it as they are trying to push edge still).

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• lloram239@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.

  From my experience with BingChat, it’s completely true. BingChat will search with Bing and summarize the results, providing sources and all. And the results are complete garbage most of the time, since search results are filled with garbage.

  Meanwhile if you ask ChatGPT, which doesn’t have Internet access, you get a far more sophisticated answer and correct answer. You can also answer follow up questions.

  Web search is an absolutely terrible place for accurate information. ChatGPT in contrast consumes all the information out there, which makes it much harder for incorrect information to slip in, as information needs to be replicated frequently to stick around. It can and often is still wrong of course, but it is far better than any single website you’ll find.

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  • sndrtj@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Chatgpt flat out hallucinates quite frequently in my experience. It never says “I don’t know / that is impossible / no one knows” to queries that simply don’t have an answer. Instead, it opts to give a plausible-sounding but completely made-up answer.

    A good AI system wouldn’t do this. It would be honest, and give no results when the information simply doesn’t exist. However, that is quite hard to do for LLMs as they are essentially glorified next-word predictors. The cost metric isn’t on accuracy of information, it’s on plausible-sounding conversation.

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    • pascal@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ask chatgpt “tell me the biography of the famous painter sndrtj” to see how good the bot is at hallucinating an incredible realistic story that never happened.

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      • Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Image

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      • CarlsIII@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You don’t even have to make stuff up to get it to hallucinate. I once asked chat gpt who the original bass player was for Metallica was, and it repeatedly gave me the wrong answer, and even at one point said “Dave Ellefson.”

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• Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If you aren’t paying for chatgpt, give a look to perplexity.ai, it is free.

  You’ll see that sources are references and linked

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  • tetris11@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Wow, it's really good. Who knew that asking a bot to provide references would immediately improve the quality of the answers?

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    • Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If you try “copilot” option, you get the full experience. It’s pretty neat because it allows for brainstorming.

      It is still a very “preliminary version experience”, because the whole thing is just few months old. But it has a lot of potential

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• cybersandwich@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I dunno. There have been quite a few times where I am trying to do something on my computer and I could either spend 5 minutes searching, refining, digging through the results…or I can ask chatgpt and have a workable answer in 5 seconds. And that answer is precisely tailored to my specifics. I don’t have to assume/research how to modify a similar answer to fit my situation.

  Obviously it’s dependent on the types of information you need, but for coding, bash scripting, Linux cli, or anything of that nature LLMs have been great and much better than Google searches.

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  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Okay but the problem with that is that LLMs not only don’t have any fidelity requirement, they can’t. They are analogous to the language planning centre of your brain, which has to be filtered through your conscious mind to check if they’re talking complete crap.

    People don’t realise this and think the bot is giving them real information, but it’s actually just giving them spookily realistic word-salad, which is a big problem.

    Of course you can fix this if you add some kind of context engine for them to truly grasp the deeper and wider meaning of your query. The problem with that is that if you do that, you’ve basically created an AGI. That may first of all be extremely difficult and far in the future, and second of all it has ethical implications that go beyond how effective of a search engine it is.

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    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Did you read my last little bit there? I said it depends on the information you are looking for. I can paste error output from my terminal into Google and try to find an answer or I can paste it into chatgpt and be, at the very least pointed in the right direction almost immediately, or even given the answer right away vs getting a stackoverflow link and parsing the responses and comments and following secondary and tiertiary links.

      I absolutely understand the stochastic parrot conundrum with LLMs. They have significant drawbacks and they are far from perfect, but then neither is are Google search results. There is still a level of skepticism you have to apply.

      One of the biggest mistakes people make is the idea that LLMs and websearching is a zero sum affair. They don’t replace each other. They compliment each other. Imo, google is messing up with their “ai” integration into Google search. It sets the expectation that it is an equivalent function.

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    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t need perfect. I need good enough

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      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Sure but if that becomes the norm then a huge segment of the population will believe the first thing the bot tells them. You might be okay, but we’re talking about an entire society filtering its knowledge through an incredibly effective misinformation engine that will lie rather than say “I don’t know”, because that simple phrase shows a level of self-awareness that eludes a lot of actual people, much less a chatbot.

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• yoz@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its already happening at my work. Many are using bing AI instead of google.

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  • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Don’t worry they’ll start monetizing LLMs and injecting ads into them soon enough and we’ll be back to square one

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• Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I suspect that client-side AI might actually be the kind of thing that filters the crap from search results and actually gets you what you want.

  That would only be Chat-AI if it turns out natural language queries are better to determine the kind of thing the user is looking for than people trying to craft more traditional query strings.

  I’m thinking each person would can train their AI based on which query results they went for in unfiltered queries, with some kind of user provided feedback of suitability to account for click-bait (i.e. somebody selecting a result because it looks good but it turns out its not).

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