3 ms·

Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cur

Not them, but no, I wouldn't have a similar reaction if it were "according to google", because in the context of a blog posted to HN I'd expect it to mean a cursory bit of research, which is way better.

MostlyStable 3y ago
In the very near future (<5 years in my opinion), nearly all search requests are going to be mediated by a GPT like AI agent. It's already true that Bing search is better for some kinds of searches than a standard google search (which has become increasingly shit over the past few years as Google has lost the SEO war to blogspam). But even if we aren't quite there yet, referencing that you asked a related question to GPT in a an article you have written is still not fundamentally different than doing some research on google. GPT will still give bad answers to certain kinds of questions (and while the author didn't say what they asked or what exactly GPT responded, my best guess is that this was a pretty useless thing to ask GPT), but you can also find some real stupid shit on Google. That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.
- howenterprisey 3y ago
  GPT and Google results are extremely fundamentally different. I can use various heuristics to evaluate how trustworthy a site I find on Google is, and if I need to I can do any amount of research on the site itself, who wrote it, etc (and if I can't, then that's useful information too). In contrast, GPT has no indication of where it got anything from, but even that's giving too much credit. It's just stringing words together. Whether it's wrong or right, I have no way of knowing. If I'm reading a website and I know the first thing it says is for sure correct (or incorrect) then I can judge the rest of it appropriately. That's absolutely not the case for GPT, because the correctness of each sentence is relatively (entirely?) statistically independent. That's only the beginning of it. There are so many more ways that doing actual research is superior; there's just no contest. I will be horrified if most searches are mediated by LLMs in the future and I will do my best to never use such a search product. (I use Kagi myself and haven't had a problem yet.)
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    Bing provides links to sources so you can evaluate the things yourself. I expect this to be the way most search will work. The AI will mostly just be filtering the searches you use. Which google already does, the AI will just do it better, since, as I mentioned earlier, Google is getting increasingly bad. I expect even searches that are not explicit, obvious LLMs like bing search to be using AI in the background. I really don't understand your issue here. Your search is already algorithmically mediated. The algorithms are just getting better. And all of this is of course a tangent on the original point which is that asking an LLM a related question is in _no way_ the same as having an LLM write the article.

MostlyStable 3y ago

In the very near future (<5 years in my opinion), nearly all search requests are going to be mediated by a GPT like AI agent. It's already true that Bing search is better for some kinds of searches than a standard google search (which has become increasingly shit over the past few years as Google has lost the SEO war to blogspam). But even if we aren't quite there yet, referencing that you asked a related question to GPT in a an article you have written is still not fundamentally different than doing some research on google. GPT will still give bad answers to certain kinds of questions (and while the author didn't say what they asked or what exactly GPT responded, my best guess is that this was a pretty useless thing to ask GPT), but you can also find some real stupid shit on Google. That sentence was almost more rhetorical flourish than anything else, and while it didn't land particularly well for me personally, I find it _far_ weirder that the commenter I replied to went off about authorship and trust.

howenterprisey 3y ago
GPT and Google results are extremely fundamentally different. I can use various heuristics to evaluate how trustworthy a site I find on Google is, and if I need to I can do any amount of research on the site itself, who wrote it, etc (and if I can't, then that's useful information too). In contrast, GPT has no indication of where it got anything from, but even that's giving too much credit. It's just stringing words together. Whether it's wrong or right, I have no way of knowing. If I'm reading a website and I know the first thing it says is for sure correct (or incorrect) then I can judge the rest of it appropriately. That's absolutely not the case for GPT, because the correctness of each sentence is relatively (entirely?) statistically independent. That's only the beginning of it. There are so many more ways that doing actual research is superior; there's just no contest. I will be horrified if most searches are mediated by LLMs in the future and I will do my best to never use such a search product. (I use Kagi myself and haven't had a problem yet.)
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  Bing provides links to sources so you can evaluate the things yourself. I expect this to be the way most search will work. The AI will mostly just be filtering the searches you use. Which google already does, the AI will just do it better, since, as I mentioned earlier, Google is getting increasingly bad. I expect even searches that are not explicit, obvious LLMs like bing search to be using AI in the background. I really don't understand your issue here. Your search is already algorithmically mediated. The algorithms are just getting better. And all of this is of course a tangent on the original point which is that asking an LLM a related question is in _no way_ the same as having an LLM write the article.