9 ms·

Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses

warkdarrior 2y ago
It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.
- dgellow 2y ago
  Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do
oldgradstudent 2y ago
Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge. r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable. But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.
- blablabla123 2y ago
  ...which is sometimes incredibly hard and it might not be possible because it's such a niche topic or people might be just wrong. Just thinking about Urban Myths, Conspiracy theories etc. where even without a niche factor things may sound unbelievable but actually disproving can be effort that is out of proportion
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  I have seen a tremendous amount of bad advice on bikewrench.
  - oldgradstudent 2y ago
    But a lot of great advice. I became a half decent home bike mechanic through reading it, and of course Park Tool videos.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  I don't know about bikewrench but AskHistorians is a useful source of knowledge because it is strongly moderated and curated. It's not just a bunch of random assholes spouting off on topics. Top level replies are unceremoniously removed if they lack sourcing or make unsourced/unsubstantiated claims. Top level posters also try to self-correct by clearly indicating when they're making claims of fact that are disputed or have unclear evidence. OpenAI, Google, and the other LLMs-are-smart boosters seem to think because the Internet is large it must be smart. They're applying the infinite monkey theorem[0] incorrectly. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
  - VancouverMan 2y ago
    In general, I have trouble trusting environments that can be described as "strongly moderated and curated". I find that environments that rely on censorship tend to foster dogma, rather than knowledge and real understanding of the topics at hand. They give an illusion of quality and trustworthiness. It's something we see happen at this site to some extent, for example. I'd rather see ideas and information being freely expressed, and if necessary, pitted against one another, with me being the one to judge for myself the ideas/claims/positions/arguments/perspectives/etc. that are being expressed.
    - giantrobot 2y ago
      Your comment is orthogonal to the quality of the AskHistorians subreddit. AskHistorians' moderation tends towards curating posts following the rules rather than content. There's often competing narratives on questions where there's academic dispute of facts. Regardless of whether you think that's the right approach to moderation, top level posts are sourced and can at least be examined. It's a marked improvement over the unsourced musings of random Redditors.
candiddevmike 2y ago
I wonder what the impact all of those erase tools are having on LLM training. The ones that replaced all of these highly upvoted comments with nonsense.
- SirMaster 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure those "erase" tools are just for the front-end and reddit keeps the original stuff in the back-end. And surely the deal Google made was for the back-end source data, or probably the data that includes the original and the edit.
  - astrange 2y ago
    The LLM does a summary of web search results. It's quoting what you can see, not pretrained knowledge, afaik.

It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.

dgellow 2y ago
Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do

oldgradstudent 2y ago

Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge. r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable. But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.

blablabla123 2y ago
...which is sometimes incredibly hard and it might not be possible because it's such a niche topic or people might be just wrong. Just thinking about Urban Myths, Conspiracy theories etc. where even without a niche factor things may sound unbelievable but actually disproving can be effort that is out of proportion
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mvdtnz 2y ago
I have seen a tremendous amount of bad advice on bikewrench.
- oldgradstudent 2y ago
  But a lot of great advice. I became a half decent home bike mechanic through reading it, and of course Park Tool videos.
giantrobot 2y ago
I don't know about bikewrench but AskHistorians is a useful source of knowledge because it is strongly moderated and curated. It's not just a bunch of random assholes spouting off on topics. Top level replies are unceremoniously removed if they lack sourcing or make unsourced/unsubstantiated claims. Top level posters also try to self-correct by clearly indicating when they're making claims of fact that are disputed or have unclear evidence. OpenAI, Google, and the other LLMs-are-smart boosters seem to think because the Internet is large it must be smart. They're applying the infinite monkey theorem[0] incorrectly. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- VancouverMan 2y ago
  In general, I have trouble trusting environments that can be described as "strongly moderated and curated". I find that environments that rely on censorship tend to foster dogma, rather than knowledge and real understanding of the topics at hand. They give an illusion of quality and trustworthiness. It's something we see happen at this site to some extent, for example. I'd rather see ideas and information being freely expressed, and if necessary, pitted against one another, with me being the one to judge for myself the ideas/claims/positions/arguments/perspectives/etc. that are being expressed.
  - giantrobot 2y ago
    Your comment is orthogonal to the quality of the AskHistorians subreddit. AskHistorians' moderation tends towards curating posts following the rules rather than content. There's often competing narratives on questions where there's academic dispute of facts. Regardless of whether you think that's the right approach to moderation, top level posts are sourced and can at least be examined. It's a marked improvement over the unsourced musings of random Redditors.

candiddevmike 2y ago

I wonder what the impact all of those erase tools are having on LLM training. The ones that replaced all of these highly upvoted comments with nonsense.

SirMaster 2y ago
I'm pretty sure those "erase" tools are just for the front-end and reddit keeps the original stuff in the back-end. And surely the deal Google made was for the back-end source data, or probably the data that includes the original and the edit.
- astrange 2y ago
  The LLM does a summary of web search results. It's quoting what you can see, not pretrained knowledge, afaik.