Technology

Ok.

> uses search engine

> search engine gives generative AI answer

God dammit

> scroll down

> click search result

> AI Generated article

The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.

Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.

"How to make a pie"

Here's how to make a pie:

Gather ingredients:

• Flour
• Eggs
• Water
• 10 pounds of dog shit
• 10 gallons of cat urine

Cooking Process:

• Step 1: Mix all ingredients and place in a pan
• Step 2: Add Gasoline
• Step 3: Bake at 9000° Celsius for 12 hours
• Step 4: ???
• Step 5: Profit?

Google search results are often completely unrelated so it's not any better. If the thing I'm looking for is obscure, AI often finds some thread that I can follow, but I always double check that information.
Know your tool limits, after hundreds of prompts I've learned pretty well when the AI is spitting bullshit answers. Real people on the internet can be just as wrong and biased, so it's best to find multiple independent sources

Biggest reason I stopped using Google

When search engines stop being shit, I will.

In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.

LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.

Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”

The absolute gall of this woman to blame her own negligence and incompetence on a tool she grossly misused.

Okay, but what else to do with it?

Start using SearXNG.

No.

Who else is going to aggregate those recipes for me without having to scroll past ads a personal blog bs?

And when the search engines shove it in your faces and try to make it so we HAVE to use it for searches to justify their stupid expenses?

This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.

Eh....I got it to find a product that met the specs I was looking for on Amazon when no other search worked. It's certainly a last resort but it worked. Idk why whenever I'm looking to buy anything lately somehow the only criteria I care about are never documented properly...

Obvious problem is obvious.