4 ms·
A couple things: - remember when search first came out and websites often had their own search bar, how bad it was and how irrelevant the top answers often wer
by andy99 3y ago
A couple things:
- remember when search first came out and websites often had their own search bar, how bad it was and how irrelevant the top answers often were. I think chat like this gets picked on more because of the natural language element, when it's not necessarily worse than previous tech
- I understand the negative press about these "failures" or flaws but it's unfortunate to see innovation discouraged. Building these things and putting them in the wild is the best way to test them, and this is still pretty low risk. They should be applauded for trying, it's their reaction that's more important. (See air canada fighting it's customers in court instead of refunding a few hundred buck over a chatbot mistake)
- related, a idea would be a kind of sandbox convention where it's made clear these are works in progress and will have issues. I don't know if that will satisfy everyone but at least it will make the readiness of the technology clear
- I hope orgs don't get discouraged from trying to build these because of the bad press
- georgeburdell 3y agoTo your top point, providing a wrong answer is significantly worse than providing an irrelevant one because the latter can be easily identified as such by the requester.
- bombcar 3y agoHere's an example from right now - go to https://www.treasurydirect.gov https://www.treasurydirect.gov and search for "ibond" - zero results. You have to search for "I bond". If you don't know that, you get horribly confused.
- zbentley 3y ago"Confused" is not the same as "misled".
- bombcar 3y agoTrue, and this does do the more precise thing of no results instead of trying to guess what you wanted.
- plorkyeran 3y agoGetting no results is a dramatically better outcome than the LLM behavior of making up something named “ibond” and providing information about this thing that doesn’t actually exist.
- rchaud 3y agoThe parallel I think of is the dark UX employed by every streaming app. If it doesn't have the show I explicitly searched for, it shows me a "you might be interested in" list that takes up the majority of the screen, instead of a simple "No results matched your query".
- wfleming 3y ago> when it's not necessarily worse than previous tech This is a good point, but on the other hand I think there is a notable difference between “the tool makes it hard to find the page with the correct info you need” and “the tool confidently gives you incorrect information without making it easy to audit accuracy”.
- TomK32 3y agoI see a big difference between one side searching for human written content and not finding it and on the other side just making up stuff. Maybe most people expect the AI to search and quote from existing human-authored content? At least in situations where laws and regulations are involved this should be the default. The problem will only get worse and you can expect humans to copy those AI-authored answers into the web where AIs are likely to digest them as facts.
- aaomidi 3y agoI wouldn’t call this “innovation”.