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Modern ChatGPT will (typically on its own; always if you instruct it to) provide inline links to back up its answers. You can click on those if it seems dubious
by mkozlows 1y ago
Modern ChatGPT will (typically on its own; always if you instruct it to) provide inline links to back up its answers. You can click on those if it seems dubious or if it's important, or trust it if it seems reasonably true and/or doesn't matter much.
The fact that it provides those relevant links is what allows it to replace Google for a lot of purposes.
- pram 1y agoIt does citations (Grok and Claude etc do too) but I've found when I read the source on some stuff (GitHub discussions and so on) it sometimes actually has nothing to do with what the LLM said. I've actually wasted a lot of time trying to find the actual spot in a threaded conversation where the example was supposedly stated.
- sarchertech 1y agoSame experience with Google search AI. The links frequently don’t support the assertions, they’ll just say something that might show up in a google search for the assertion. For example if I’m asking about whether a feature exists in some library, the AI says yes it does and links to a forum where someone is asking the same question I did, but no one answered (this has happened multiple times).
- Nemi 1y agoIt is funny, Perplexity seems to work much better in this use case for me. When I want some sort of "conclusive answer", I use Gemini pro (just what I have available). It is good with coding and formulating thoughts, rewriting text, so on. But when I want to actually search for content on the web for, say, product research or opinions on a topic, Perplexity is so much better than either Gemini or google search AI. It lists reference links for each block of assertions that are EASILY clicked on (unlike Gemini or search AI, where the references are just harder to click on for some reason, not the least of which is that they OPEN IN THE SAME TAB where Perplexity always opens on a new tab). This is often a reddit specific search as I want people's opinions on something. Perplexity's UI for search specifically is the main thing it does just so much better than google's offering is the one thing going for it. I think there is some irony there. Full disclosure, I don't use Anthropic or OpenAI, so this may not be the case for those products.
- platevoltage 1y agoIn my experience, 80% of the links it provides are either 404, or go to a thread on a forum that is completely unrelated to the subject. Im also someone who refuses to pay for it, so maybe the paid versions do better. who knows.
- cout 1y agoThe 404 links are truly bizarre. Nearly every link to github.com seems to be 404. That seems like something that should be trivial for a tool to verify.
- platevoltage 1y agoYeah. The fact that I can't ask ChatGPT for a source makes the tool way less useful. It will straight up say "I verified all of these links" too.
- mh- 1y agoAs you identified, not paying for it is a big part of the issue. Running these things is expensive, and they're just not serving the same experience to non-paying users. One could argue this is a bad idea on their part, letting people get a bad taste of an inferior product. And I wouldn't disagree, but I don't know what a sustainable alternative approach is.
- xigoi 1y agoSurely the cost of sending a few HTTP requests and seeing if they 404 is negligible compared to AI inference.
- platevoltage 1y agoI would have no issue if the free version of ChatGPT told me straight up “You gotta pay for links and sources”. It doesn’t do that.
- 1y ago