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[Discussion] What's your thoughts on AI generated search engines compared to other ways to find information? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Jaluvshuskies to c/[email protected]

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Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys' thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)

I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can't for the life of my find those threads and comments lol

I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don't know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can't replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the "best" way to find information, but I don't know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)

I don't know much about this topic, but I'm curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.

EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I'm not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can't really continue everyone's responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I'll try to think of some follow up questions :)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

AI generated search is a huge improvement over what we had before. Before, when you searched a question or topic that doesn't have a Wikipedia page or easy answer, you get a ton of SEO spam. Stack Overflow is still a great resource for programming, but for most general knowledge, AI generated is so much more useful.

I've been using Brave Search and the AI summarizer is pretty good, and I get to avoid loading shitty websites. For specific questions that aren't easy for search engines to answer, I really like how ChatGPT is conversational and lets you ask followup questions. Another thing I've been using is perplexity.ai, it can actually search the internet and cite sources.

Overall, AI has been a big help to me, and lets me avoid going to other websites which are usually just awful now. Most websites are full of ads, trackers, cookie notices, "Checking your connection", I'm done with dealing with that. Search engines are there when I forget the domain for a service or link to a GitHub project.

[–] Jaluvshuskies 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

By "what we had before", you probably mean normal google searching, right? If so, yea I feel like AI searching would be better than that. I honestly don't know what happened to google or when it stopped having quality. It would be interesting to watch a documentary or visual about how google changed over time, what changed it, and why it's searching experience is so poor now

Do you think that thread-based platforms that have user-generated content is the "best" source for information? (With the exception of SO, which I agree is probably superior for programming)

I haven't heard of perplexity.ai before, but I just tried it with the first recent issue that I had that came to mind, and I'm already not super impressed - I know this is literally one question so far, but it gave me a source for steam deck which my question wasn't about

This is an example of a question that someone would ask and need to provide info on what they already tried, setup details, more info about the situation, etc - and then people would comment likely with follow-up questions, or instantly know the solution from having to deal with it elsewhere. Obviously, this would go in the "troubleshooting" category, which seems that AI would have to redirect the user to rather than having the definitive answer to; at which point we're probably better off searching ourselves

Another recent thing I have had to look up, was various tricks to pull out a screw off the back of my mechanical keyboard that had been stripped and we couldn't get it out. Here's what I get when using perplexity:

Pretty good, my engineering S/O knows all sorts of tricks for this, and a few of them are actually listed here. However, I feel that I need to validate the legitimacy of the AI's response by going to the sources directly - which seems like an extra step that defeats the purpose of AI searching

Either way - it's interesting! And I think could be a useful tool in some ways. Also 100% agree on being done with the bullshit that is ads, bloatware, etc. Sorry for the wall btw lol