5 ms·

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anythi

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in the thread. Synthesizing multiple comments together requires nuance based on circumstances that I don't think I would trust to an automated process- which heuristics were applied, what was the reputation of the people on either side, etc. Hell, I don't even stop at the first recipe I find if I'm looking for something new to cook for dinner. I look at a couple variations on a dish first.

ok123456 3y ago
The appeal is that now regular search engines are so bad at giving you useful content that using a LLM is now the equivalent of "google-dorking" to find relevant information.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Only because the LLM didn't have any AI generated blogspam to get trained on. That's going to change very quickly.
  - ok123456 3y ago
    Any non-trival LLM that works by scraping the internet is already sufficiently advanced to be able to classify blogspam.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      The issue Google has with blogspam is they don't want to filter it because it inevitably uses Google's advertising. So Google gets to self-deal traffic to blogspam which makes them money. They're not incentivized to actually eliminate blogspam. LLMs aren't automatically disincentivized from training on blogspam so they're not going to avoid it either.
njovin 3y ago
It's funny that you mention recipes at the end because that's exactly what I like to use ChatGPT for. Every single recipe site has been so corrupted by SEO that you need to scroll past 12 paragraphs of nonsense to get to the actual recipe, and more often than not once you actually get to the recipe part you'll be bombarded with popups about newsletters and cookies or some late-loading ad will cause the view to shift past the step you're trying to look at. ChatGPT is great for distilling that experience down to just a simple recipe for whatever it is I'm looking for. Tangentially: props to AnyList for their amazing plugin that scrapes recipes off of sites like this and stores them in an easy-to-use format.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think it's pretty safe to say if any of these AI-based models gain dominance, they will eventually add junk to their output if that junk makes money. My prediction: By 2025, you'll be able to purchase sponsored sentences and sponsored paragraphs in ChatGPT's (or whoever's on top) output.
- mentos 3y ago
  I just used ChatGPT4 this past weekend to come up with smoothie recipes and then a shopping list to take to Whole Foods. Can also give it ingredients you already have and ask for recipes. It’s a killer application for me ha
99_00 3y ago
The appeal is that AI answers your question. Maybe a wrong answer. Maybe from questionable sources. Search, on the other hand, doesn't answer your question.
refulgentis 3y ago
Simple: get the search results, have LLM read and evaluate them. It's devilishly difficult to get citations in there, you're not going to do it with langchain, but its possible (c.f. Bing). Python x langchain x LLMs makes it very easy to create demos so there's been an initial influx of meh stuff, I'm very excited for 6 months from now.
- mguerville 3y ago
  A niche provider that doesn't do generative AI very well but does "AI powered search with citations" is perplexity.ai I've used for rather obscure queries and liked the summary the AI wrote as well as the links to dive deeper. I imagine that's what AI search will look like across all providers before long.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    That site looks incredibly good. I threw in a question Wikipedia does kinda answer but leaves a lot of details off, and it enumerated a set of possible answers, with my favored option linking into a forum where it looks like less than a dozen people post, but with people that tried all variations of it and know all of the details. DDG and Google would never show me that site (yeah, I've tried).
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Just to add, that forum has better answers than the ones GPT created directly on the search engine. If it was a "consult the Oracle" interface instead of a search engine, it wouldn't be useful at all.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answer is appearing right away. Of course I understand ChatGPT shouldn't be used for this because it will lie to you and make things up. But I am saying that's why you'll see people who don't know that preferring it over Google.
- VMG 3y ago
  painful how accurate that is
- zpeti 3y ago
  Aaand this is basically the story of silicon valley over and over again. Build a product that's more convenient, and people will use it. Google is so full of shit now, and even answer boxes are below 4 ads, it's just way more comfortable and efficient to ask chatgpt. This morning I wanted to know how many calories there are in a breaded chicken breast. Chatgpt told me in 3 seconds after asking. Google would have been way more time. (sidenote: I also hate google, so I'd much rather use chatgpt anyway)
  - trafficante 3y ago
    Also Google (and distressingly, DDG as of late) sanitizes the hell out of the SERPs to only present you with “approved viewpoints”. And I’m not talking about fringe Q Anon type stuff: the other day I was looking up the specifics of China’s “Blue Sky Initiative” climate change policies and the only thing Goog/DDG would show me (despite several attempts at rephrasing the query) was Western industry think tanks bellyaching about how the policies effect profits. It took me a good ten minutes of refining my search before I got an English translation of the actual policy bullet points. I can’t imagine this being such a PITA on 2013 era Google.
  - byteware 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nbadg 3y ago
I suspect this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what tools like ChatGPT actually are, what their capabilities are, etc. I think there is a large population of people who think they're simply more sophisticated versions of Siri. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people don't even realize they're powered by different things, but instead just see the "marketing term currently known as AI" as a singular monolithic entity, and all related technology just gets lumped into the same category. That's miles away from understanding how "use a language model to interpret what I'm asking you to search for, and then plug that into a normal search engine, and read me back the most relevant result", is fundamentally different from "use a language model to predict the stastically most likely next sequence of tokens based on the ones you gave me." I don't mean this as a way of thumbing my nose at people who don't know this stuff, but rather, to point out what a massive failure the completely nonexistent consumer education surrounding ML products has been.
ditch_baby 3y ago
This is the logical endgame for the search engine form factor. Remember watching mom ask google questions using complete sentences and punctuation with a “please and thank you”? The appeal of a conversational response was too great to wait for a solution to the problem of training data quality.
larperdoodle 3y ago
When you're not sure what to Google (such as when working in an unfamiliar domain), asking ChatGPT for help and then researching it's answer with normal searches is very effective.
hawk_ 3y ago
ChatGPT like AI is the natural next step in the arms race of SEO vs Search. Right now is a mechanism to fight SEO. It will continue to work for a few years.
rchaud 3y ago
> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. Search requires work on the part of the user to distinguish between good links and bad. AI is an oracle just tells you what you're looking for. Now you and I might think this is a terrible way to evaluate the veracity of information. But think about the new generation of mobile-native users who were raised on simplistic discourse in tweet-length messages, and would rather watch a 1-min video on a topic than scan search results for 30 seconds. For this group, searching for information where more than 2 clicks is required is going to be a "too complicated", anda "bad user experience".
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > AI is an oracle just tells you what you're looking for. LLMs are oracles that arrange words in a probabilistic order that are grammatically correct and may be factually correct. Unfortunately there's no way to evaluate the probability of confabulation with any of the LLM chat bots. The distribution of occurrences confabulation is also not regular or predictable nor is it fixed. So you can't ever say "ChatGPT is bad at X" because it can be bad today, good tomorrow, then bad the next day.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  It sounds like we are dooming an entire generation by catering to a maladaption of technology-addiction induced ADD.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Idiocracy and The Machine Stops ... All At Once.
wongarsu 3y ago
LLMs are the worst method for information retrial, except for every other method we tried.

ok123456 3y ago

The appeal is that now regular search engines are so bad at giving you useful content that using a LLM is now the equivalent of "google-dorking" to find relevant information.

rchaud 3y ago
Only because the LLM didn't have any AI generated blogspam to get trained on. That's going to change very quickly.
- ok123456 3y ago
  Any non-trival LLM that works by scraping the internet is already sufficiently advanced to be able to classify blogspam.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    The issue Google has with blogspam is they don't want to filter it because it inevitably uses Google's advertising. So Google gets to self-deal traffic to blogspam which makes them money. They're not incentivized to actually eliminate blogspam. LLMs aren't automatically disincentivized from training on blogspam so they're not going to avoid it either.

njovin 3y ago

It's funny that you mention recipes at the end because that's exactly what I like to use ChatGPT for. Every single recipe site has been so corrupted by SEO that you need to scroll past 12 paragraphs of nonsense to get to the actual recipe, and more often than not once you actually get to the recipe part you'll be bombarded with popups about newsletters and cookies or some late-loading ad will cause the view to shift past the step you're trying to look at. ChatGPT is great for distilling that experience down to just a simple recipe for whatever it is I'm looking for. Tangentially: props to AnyList for their amazing plugin that scrapes recipes off of sites like this and stores them in an easy-to-use format.

ryandrake 3y ago
I think it's pretty safe to say if any of these AI-based models gain dominance, they will eventually add junk to their output if that junk makes money. My prediction: By 2025, you'll be able to purchase sponsored sentences and sponsored paragraphs in ChatGPT's (or whoever's on top) output.
mentos 3y ago
I just used ChatGPT4 this past weekend to come up with smoothie recipes and then a shopping list to take to Whole Foods. Can also give it ingredients you already have and ask for recipes. It’s a killer application for me ha

99_00 3y ago

The appeal is that AI answers your question. Maybe a wrong answer. Maybe from questionable sources. Search, on the other hand, doesn't answer your question.

refulgentis 3y ago

Simple: get the search results, have LLM read and evaluate them. It's devilishly difficult to get citations in there, you're not going to do it with langchain, but its possible (c.f. Bing). Python x langchain x LLMs makes it very easy to create demos so there's been an initial influx of meh stuff, I'm very excited for 6 months from now.

mguerville 3y ago
A niche provider that doesn't do generative AI very well but does "AI powered search with citations" is perplexity.ai I've used for rather obscure queries and liked the summary the AI wrote as well as the links to dive deeper. I imagine that's what AI search will look like across all providers before long.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  That site looks incredibly good. I threw in a question Wikipedia does kinda answer but leaves a lot of details off, and it enumerated a set of possible answers, with my favored option linking into a forum where it looks like less than a dozen people post, but with people that tried all variations of it and know all of the details. DDG and Google would never show me that site (yeah, I've tried).
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Just to add, that forum has better answers than the ones GPT created directly on the search engine. If it was a "consult the Oracle" interface instead of a search engine, it wouldn't be useful at all.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answer is appearing right away. Of course I understand ChatGPT shouldn't be used for this because it will lie to you and make things up. But I am saying that's why you'll see people who don't know that preferring it over Google.

VMG 3y ago
painful how accurate that is
zpeti 3y ago
Aaand this is basically the story of silicon valley over and over again. Build a product that's more convenient, and people will use it. Google is so full of shit now, and even answer boxes are below 4 ads, it's just way more comfortable and efficient to ask chatgpt. This morning I wanted to know how many calories there are in a breaded chicken breast. Chatgpt told me in 3 seconds after asking. Google would have been way more time. (sidenote: I also hate google, so I'd much rather use chatgpt anyway)
- trafficante 3y ago
  Also Google (and distressingly, DDG as of late) sanitizes the hell out of the SERPs to only present you with “approved viewpoints”. And I’m not talking about fringe Q Anon type stuff: the other day I was looking up the specifics of China’s “Blue Sky Initiative” climate change policies and the only thing Goog/DDG would show me (despite several attempts at rephrasing the query) was Western industry think tanks bellyaching about how the policies effect profits. It took me a good ten minutes of refining my search before I got an English translation of the actual policy bullet points. I can’t imagine this being such a PITA on 2013 era Google.
- byteware 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nbadg 3y ago

I suspect this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what tools like ChatGPT actually are, what their capabilities are, etc. I think there is a large population of people who think they're simply more sophisticated versions of Siri. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people don't even realize they're powered by different things, but instead just see the "marketing term currently known as AI" as a singular monolithic entity, and all related technology just gets lumped into the same category. That's miles away from understanding how "use a language model to interpret what I'm asking you to search for, and then plug that into a normal search engine, and read me back the most relevant result", is fundamentally different from "use a language model to predict the stastically most likely next sequence of tokens based on the ones you gave me." I don't mean this as a way of thumbing my nose at people who don't know this stuff, but rather, to point out what a massive failure the completely nonexistent consumer education surrounding ML products has been.

ditch_baby 3y ago

This is the logical endgame for the search engine form factor. Remember watching mom ask google questions using complete sentences and punctuation with a “please and thank you”? The appeal of a conversational response was too great to wait for a solution to the problem of training data quality.

larperdoodle 3y ago

When you're not sure what to Google (such as when working in an unfamiliar domain), asking ChatGPT for help and then researching it's answer with normal searches is very effective.

hawk_ 3y ago

ChatGPT like AI is the natural next step in the arms race of SEO vs Search. Right now is a mechanism to fight SEO. It will continue to work for a few years.

rchaud 3y ago

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. Search requires work on the part of the user to distinguish between good links and bad. AI is an oracle just tells you what you're looking for. Now you and I might think this is a terrible way to evaluate the veracity of information. But think about the new generation of mobile-native users who were raised on simplistic discourse in tweet-length messages, and would rather watch a 1-min video on a topic than scan search results for 30 seconds. For this group, searching for information where more than 2 clicks is required is going to be a "too complicated", anda "bad user experience".

giantrobot 3y ago
> AI is an oracle just tells you what you're looking for. LLMs are oracles that arrange words in a probabilistic order that are grammatically correct and may be factually correct. Unfortunately there's no way to evaluate the probability of confabulation with any of the LLM chat bots. The distribution of occurrences confabulation is also not regular or predictable nor is it fixed. So you can't ever say "ChatGPT is bad at X" because it can be bad today, good tomorrow, then bad the next day.
zdragnar 3y ago
It sounds like we are dooming an entire generation by catering to a maladaption of technology-addiction induced ADD.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Idiocracy and The Machine Stops ... All At Once.

wongarsu 3y ago

LLMs are the worst method for information retrial, except for every other method we tried.