Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
squaresinger@feddit.de 1 year ago
The part about Google isn’t wrong.
But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 1 year 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.
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
ChatGPT is already getting worse at code commenting and programming.
The problem is that enshitification is basically a requirement in a capitalist economy.
sab@kbin.social 1 year 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.
RatherBeMTB@sh.itjust.works 1 year 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.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
ribboo@lemm.ee 1 year 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.
SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 1 year 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.
twinnie@feddit.uk 1 year 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.
madnificent@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you fact-check the answers?
kubica@kbin.social 1 year 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).
Baines@lemmy.world 1 year ago
give it time, algos will fuck those results as well
madnificent@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you fact-check the answers?
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 year 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).
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
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.
sndrtj@feddit.nl 1 year 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.
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 1 year 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
tetris11@kbin.social 1 year ago
Wow, it's really good. Who knew that asking a bot to provide references would immediately improve the quality of the answers?
cybersandwich@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 year 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.
yoz@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Its already happening at my work. Many are using bing AI instead of google.
DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 1 year ago
Don’t worry they’ll start monetizing LLMs and injecting ads into them soon enough and we’ll be back to square one
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year 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).