5 ms·

Before it got choked off I had started using chatGPT for all of my searches. For code examples it blows google out of the water. For learning esoteric things (l

Before it got choked off I had started using chatGPT for all of my searches. For code examples it blows google out of the water. For learning esoteric things (like congressional procedures etc.) quickly, it is without peer. I think Google's founders offered their take years ago...no one listened then.

archagon 4y ago
ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  On the other hand, the same is also true of Google results. The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.
  - dmcgee 4y ago
    From a user experience perspective it's interesting that it may be a worse experience to get a set of links and have to pick from them and use cognitive effort to discern which sources are reliable, than to simply use ChatGPT and get an answer. But this step is precisely where verification happens.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of cognitive effort most people apply to Google search results. It's more like "First one on the list? Well, that one's right -- unless it disagrees with my personal biases, then maybe I'll look for another one."
      - dmcgee 4y ago
        I didn't suggest that people are good at making that effort. They arent. But the irony is that it's precisely in that difficulty that the act of verification lies. The fact that it's so difficult that it's not at all an efficient method for discernment suggests that it's either done on purpose or Google's UI is just not good for that purpose, or both.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      Internet content is very rarely verifiable. Very few websites cite any sources aside from Wikipedia.
  - v0x 4y ago
    At least with traditional search results, there are some indicia of their trustworthiness: does the author/outlet have a history of deception, are their assertions well-sourced, etc. With a chatbot result, it's effectively a black box.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  It is wrong much more than 1% of the time.
- v3ss0n 4y ago
  In Any advance topic the error rate is closed to 60%
  - janosdebugs 4y ago
    Sadly, so is Google. I've been searching for advanced Blender topics yesterday and even with 20-30 tries at writing a search phrase I just got a lot of the same ****.
- rpdillon 4y ago
  Agree with everything you said, but I want to dig into why I don't find the critique compelling. In short, I see a need for us all to inherently distrust anything single thing we read -- everything needs to be verified and checked out across multiple (hopefully diverse) sources of information before it can be considered "truth" in any sense. I do develop trust in certain sources over time, but meta-sources like an AI or a search engine don't get this treatment because their scope is too broad. As an example, I tend to trust folks like Fabien Sanglard[0], Eric Goldman[1], and Adam Langley[2]. Example: over on the Morrowind subreddit a few years ago, an artist had been painting landscapes of the game "Morrowind" (oil on canvas, IIRC), and when he went to print them as posters to sell to fans, the site he wanted to print them on warned him that printing his own paintings of vistas from Morrowind was copyright infringement (it's not). He came to the Morrowind subreddit for help because he'd been actively misled. Sites like plagiarism.org[3] confidently say false things: > But can words and ideas really be stolen? > According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file). This is confidently incorrect in a couple of different ways. It might seem like incompetence (and may be), but it's worth noting that plagiarism.org is actually run by TurnItIn, which profits from people not really understanding how copyright works. Similar example (I tend to look into copyright, trademark, and patent issues a lot): I got into a discussion with another HNer about IP law, and they cited an article written by an actual lawyer[4] on a site called "The National Law Review" that's simply wrong about IP law to defend their position. It's tragic, because we've built this sort of cargo cult around "citation, please?" but then all-too-often don't keep our critical thinking skills engaged as we evaluate the source. This is true all over. I've read HN daily for more than 10 years. Not only does every comment need scrutiny (even if stated confidently), but most stories linked on the front page do as well. It's not just blog posts or opinion pieces; some scientific studies that are posted get torn apart in the comments, to enough of a degree that, after cross-checking, I tend to think the study itself is deeply flawed. And there are numerous stories about how Google's Quick Answers confidently give the wrong answer, as highlighted in 2017 by the WSJ[5]. I'm not saying accuracy doesn't matter, but I feel the "ChatGPT is confidently wrong" needs more context or comparative analysis around it before it becomes a compelling argument, since "confidently wrong" applies to search engines and humans as well. I haven't seen any in-depth studies on this, but would love to. [0]: https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ [1]: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/ https://blog.ericgoldman.org/ [2]: https://www.imperialviolet.org/ https://www.imperialviolet.org/ [3]: https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism [4]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/enforce-your-intellectual-property-or-risk-losing-it https://www.natlawreview.com/article/enforce-your-intellectu... [5]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to...
- irq-1 4y ago
  This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think. Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.
  - ghusbands 4y ago
    While I use ChatGPT myself, its ability to invent true-seeming information is insidious. One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readily believe and pass around, though. Similarly, when I was trying to concatenate video in ffmpeg, it produced convincing-seeming command lines, almost none of which worked properly, but almost all of which used actual ffmpeg command line parameters with appropriate-seeming formats and names. I wasted significant time on debugging those before realising quite how wrong ChatGPT was.
    - twoodfin 4y ago
      I like to describe ChatGPT as a highly weaponized form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      I would ask it if it's sure.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    > What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information. That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing. If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing. If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.
- tracerbulletx 4y ago
  The only thing that matters to me is overall usefulness. If I had access to a practitioner of a craft to teach me, and they mostly lead me in the right direction but also had some dumb ideas and incorrect practices. Well I would still want to learn from that person and expect my self to be critical and improve on the work of my teacher. As long as ChatGPT assists me more than it harms me it is quite powerful simply due to the number of different things it can assist me with, and the raw scalability.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Proving statements reasonably true is a lot easier than coming up with them from scratch. ChatGPT finds the needle in a haystack, you're job is to check it is a needle. For some questions it mostly returns junk but it returns needles often enough to speed up whatever you were doing.
- nicbou 4y ago
  So are google search results. You have a few really good resources, and many listicles paraphrasing them. With Google completely ignoring the keywords you typed, you end up with a lot of the latter.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
Without peer? It gets facts completely wrong for which Google produces the correct result on the first hit.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  Are we using the same google? Unless I add 'reddit' to the results, I hardly can even find anything useful anymore.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    I am claiming google always provides the best results but that ChstGPT many times gives completely incorrect answers for which the right answer is found in the first result of a simple google search.
bushbaba 4y ago
If they adopted chatgpt, you wouldn’t get the ads to links and their entire monetization strategy would need to change. I’m sure many at google brought up the technology as disruptive but leadership didn’t want to take the revenue hit. It’s a common challenge and similar to why Amazon was so successful at disrupting retail. Retailers could have competed, but not without huge hits to profitability which shareholders would never get behind.

archagon 4y ago

ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
On the other hand, the same is also true of Google results. The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.
- dmcgee 4y ago
  From a user experience perspective it's interesting that it may be a worse experience to get a set of links and have to pick from them and use cognitive effort to discern which sources are reliable, than to simply use ChatGPT and get an answer. But this step is precisely where verification happens.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of cognitive effort most people apply to Google search results. It's more like "First one on the list? Well, that one's right -- unless it disagrees with my personal biases, then maybe I'll look for another one."
    - dmcgee 4y ago
      I didn't suggest that people are good at making that effort. They arent. But the irony is that it's precisely in that difficulty that the act of verification lies. The fact that it's so difficult that it's not at all an efficient method for discernment suggests that it's either done on purpose or Google's UI is just not good for that purpose, or both.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Internet content is very rarely verifiable. Very few websites cite any sources aside from Wikipedia.
- v0x 4y ago
  At least with traditional search results, there are some indicia of their trustworthiness: does the author/outlet have a history of deception, are their assertions well-sourced, etc. With a chatbot result, it's effectively a black box.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
It is wrong much more than 1% of the time.
v3ss0n 4y ago
In Any advance topic the error rate is closed to 60%
- janosdebugs 4y ago
  Sadly, so is Google. I've been searching for advanced Blender topics yesterday and even with 20-30 tries at writing a search phrase I just got a lot of the same ****.
rpdillon 4y ago
Agree with everything you said, but I want to dig into why I don't find the critique compelling. In short, I see a need for us all to inherently distrust anything single thing we read -- everything needs to be verified and checked out across multiple (hopefully diverse) sources of information before it can be considered "truth" in any sense. I do develop trust in certain sources over time, but meta-sources like an AI or a search engine don't get this treatment because their scope is too broad. As an example, I tend to trust folks like Fabien Sanglard[0], Eric Goldman[1], and Adam Langley[2]. Example: over on the Morrowind subreddit a few years ago, an artist had been painting landscapes of the game "Morrowind" (oil on canvas, IIRC), and when he went to print them as posters to sell to fans, the site he wanted to print them on warned him that printing his own paintings of vistas from Morrowind was copyright infringement (it's not). He came to the Morrowind subreddit for help because he'd been actively misled. Sites like plagiarism.org[3] confidently say false things: > But can words and ideas really be stolen? > According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file). This is confidently incorrect in a couple of different ways. It might seem like incompetence (and may be), but it's worth noting that plagiarism.org is actually run by TurnItIn, which profits from people not really understanding how copyright works. Similar example (I tend to look into copyright, trademark, and patent issues a lot): I got into a discussion with another HNer about IP law, and they cited an article written by an actual lawyer[4] on a site called "The National Law Review" that's simply wrong about IP law to defend their position. It's tragic, because we've built this sort of cargo cult around "citation, please?" but then all-too-often don't keep our critical thinking skills engaged as we evaluate the source. This is true all over. I've read HN daily for more than 10 years. Not only does every comment need scrutiny (even if stated confidently), but most stories linked on the front page do as well. It's not just blog posts or opinion pieces; some scientific studies that are posted get torn apart in the comments, to enough of a degree that, after cross-checking, I tend to think the study itself is deeply flawed. And there are numerous stories about how Google's Quick Answers confidently give the wrong answer, as highlighted in 2017 by the WSJ[5]. I'm not saying accuracy doesn't matter, but I feel the "ChatGPT is confidently wrong" needs more context or comparative analysis around it before it becomes a compelling argument, since "confidently wrong" applies to search engines and humans as well. I haven't seen any in-depth studies on this, but would love to. [0]: https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ [1]: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/ https://blog.ericgoldman.org/ [2]: https://www.imperialviolet.org/ https://www.imperialviolet.org/ [3]: https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism [4]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/enforce-your-intellectual-property-or-risk-losing-it https://www.natlawreview.com/article/enforce-your-intellectu... [5]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to...
irq-1 4y ago
This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think. Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.
- ghusbands 4y ago
  While I use ChatGPT myself, its ability to invent true-seeming information is insidious. One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readily believe and pass around, though. Similarly, when I was trying to concatenate video in ffmpeg, it produced convincing-seeming command lines, almost none of which worked properly, but almost all of which used actual ffmpeg command line parameters with appropriate-seeming formats and names. I wasted significant time on debugging those before realising quite how wrong ChatGPT was.
  - twoodfin 4y ago
    I like to describe ChatGPT as a highly weaponized form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    I would ask it if it's sure.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  > What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information. That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing. If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing. If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
The only thing that matters to me is overall usefulness. If I had access to a practitioner of a craft to teach me, and they mostly lead me in the right direction but also had some dumb ideas and incorrect practices. Well I would still want to learn from that person and expect my self to be critical and improve on the work of my teacher. As long as ChatGPT assists me more than it harms me it is quite powerful simply due to the number of different things it can assist me with, and the raw scalability.
Gigachad 4y ago
Proving statements reasonably true is a lot easier than coming up with them from scratch. ChatGPT finds the needle in a haystack, you're job is to check it is a needle. For some questions it mostly returns junk but it returns needles often enough to speed up whatever you were doing.
nicbou 4y ago
So are google search results. You have a few really good resources, and many listicles paraphrasing them. With Google completely ignoring the keywords you typed, you end up with a lot of the latter.

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

Without peer? It gets facts completely wrong for which Google produces the correct result on the first hit.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
Are we using the same google? Unless I add 'reddit' to the results, I hardly can even find anything useful anymore.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I am claiming google always provides the best results but that ChstGPT many times gives completely incorrect answers for which the right answer is found in the first result of a simple google search.

bushbaba 4y ago

If they adopted chatgpt, you wouldn’t get the ads to links and their entire monetization strategy would need to change. I’m sure many at google brought up the technology as disruptive but leadership didn’t want to take the revenue hit. It’s a common challenge and similar to why Amazon was so successful at disrupting retail. Retailers could have competed, but not without huge hits to profitability which shareholders would never get behind.