5 ms·
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their so
by nostrademons 5mo ago
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
- dbbk 5mo agoAll of Google AI Mode is sourced.
- skywhopper 5mo agoYes, and those sources often contradict the AI summary if you follow them (or if you know anything about the topic).
- bsimpson 5mo agoA common pattern: Type your question in Android/Chrome search bar: "Is …?" AI Overview on the search results page: "No…" Click through to the AI mode tab/"Dive deeper with AI" CTA: "Yes…"
- burnte 5mo agoI love when I read the source link and it says the exact opposite of what the AI summary said. Sorry, no, I hate that.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nilamo 5mo agoIf it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.
- nostrademons 5mo agoIf I'm going to an LLM (as with websearch before it), it's usually because I don't know the answer, don't have anyone close to me that knows the answer, and can't pay anyone (or don't know who to pay) for the answer. In other words, my failure rate without the LLM would be 100%.
- chickenbutts 5mo ago[dead]
- tempest_ 5mo agoThe problem is that everything you have said renders you unable to determine the validity of the answer provided. Sometimes that is fine, sometimes it is not
- nostrademons 5mo agoIt's much easier to determine the truth of an answer than it is to come up with that answer yourself. This is analogous to the P=NP problem or the recognition vs. recall problem: it is much easier to recognize and verify a correct answer than it is to recall or generate it yourself. I've got a pretty solid algorithm for checking correctness: I ask the LLM for its sources, I try to find 3-5 independent ones (that are not just copying each others' answers), and if they all agree, that's very likely to be the correct answer. Simple math here: if you have 5 sources and they are each 60% likely to be correct, then an LLM choosing at random from them would have a 60% success rate, while someone checking all 5 of them for agreement would have a 1 - (0.4^5) = 99% chance of being correct. It's a good algorithm for doing other things like verifying scientific papers, too: you look for indendent research groups that have all reproduced the same findings. I did the same thing with ten-blue-links websearch as well, and hope this would be the habit of anyone else too. (Although I know it wasn't, because I worked on Google websearch 15 years ago, on a project to increase the credibility of search results, and we did cafeteria UX studies about "What makes a credible result?" and everybody said "Because it appears as the top result on Google.")
- SkyBelow 5mo agoBecause being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly. Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for. This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?
- reaperducer 5mo agoBecause being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly. Please don't ever go into aerospace. Or healthcare. Or engineering. Or pretty much anything that actually matters.
- wvenable 5mo agoI don't find it nearly that bad. If I really need factual information, it will generally go off and read the data from primary sources anyway. So unless it's really misunderstanding context, you're getting the data from the source.
- elictronic 5mo agoIt really matters the task. General knowledge from Wikipedia, great. Things more specific, with any thought needing to be used, or technical fields outside of software his numbers are pretty close to mine.
- wvenable 5mo agoThe problem too, is that we're all using different tools with different experiences -- there isn't one "AI". And if you're not paying for it, you're getting some real bad experience.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoThe point is the sources will disappear without the traffic/ad revenue.
- javawizard 5mo agoBecause it finds the sources much quicker than I would have been able to on my own, and I can then synthesize them into data I know is correct, as correct as any human-generated data can be of course.
- daemin 5mo agoBut what that because their search was so bad that it took you that long to find the sources?
- javawizard 5mo agoNo, it's usually because it finds sources that I would not have even thought to search for in the first place. Agentic AI has its faults, but one thing I've found it to be very good at is surfacing the "unknown unknowns": things I didn't know I should have searched for but that are directly relevant to my problem.
- johnfn 5mo agoWith Google returning lists full of SEO spam, 2 out of 5 is quite good. If you know something better than that, I'd love to hear it.
- luma 5mo agoBecause way more than three out of five Google results are SEO garbage or sponsored crap. The bar has been set extremely low by Google, a 60% validity rate sounds magical.
- classified 5mo agoIndeed, enshittification has been so thorough, internet search is virtually useless now.
- thfuran 5mo agoIf it even exists.
- masfuerte 5mo agoYes, but this is much more effort than a traditional search result that has a relevant quote from the source right there.
- puttycat 5mo agoChatGPT is the only bot that reliably cites sources (through Web search mode). The other bots either make up links or simply don't provide any information that is distinguishable from the LLM predictive output. Ironically Gemini is also very bad at this, while it should have been the best at Web search. Gemini also does something very patchy, which is to provide "links" which are in fact GET queries into classic Google search. I'm guessing they did it this way because the links generated/hallucinated by the LLM were too unreliable.
- lunar_mycroft 5mo agoIf I have to read the sources anyway, why not just have the model give me the links themselves? You know, like search engines already do?
- jrmg 5mo agoSearch engines don’t do that any more - they just give you a bunch of SEO spam sites, now mostly filled with plausible slop. Answers from search are _less_ reliable than answers from an LLM now. I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines are. Model collapse everywhere.
- lunar_mycroft 5mo agoIf the LLM is capable of providing good citations, then those citations could be returned in the same format as traditional search engines, not the new, LLM generated content first format. If they aren't capable of providing good citations, then the suggestion I was replying to is incorrect (and you'd have no way of knowing if they were right or not)
- nostrademons 5mo agoIn general users don't like to have to follow citations, even if they should. They'd rather have an answer right in front of them, even if there's a good chance that it's wrong. Google, like most consumer product companies, designs for the majority. Citations are a niche feature for the 5-10% of users that like to do their own research. The majority just wants an answer, which has been the direction Google's gone in since Knowledge Panels and the Answer OneBox came out in 2012.
- lunar_mycroft 5mo agoThat might make sense (at least on the first order, second order effects would still be horrible) if the LLM generated answer was reliably correct. It isn't.
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoDont they all do that ? I know that deepseek has links for every chain it makes where you can read the source and it's actually a good thing to check on that.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoAsking an LLM to cite sources just leads to hallucinated sources, same as any other attempt to make it explain its thinking process. It doesn't have actual visibility into its internal processes, just rationalizes an explanation.
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoI never ask deepseek to cite sources, it just does. And I check everytime, it always corroborate to what is being said.
- johneth 5mo agoA lot of the time they hallucinate the sources, too.