I think the difference between actual search engines and ChatGPT is that one presents you with a sampling of info you can filter and triangulate, whereas the other spoon-feeds you a single, quite possibly wildly inaccurate answer - ThreadSky

faineg.bsky.social • 136 days ago

I think the difference between actual search engines and ChatGPT is that one presents you with a sampling of info you can filter and triangulate, whereas the other spoon-feeds you a single, quite possibly wildly inaccurate answer

Reposted from Faine Greenwood

I firmly believe we can culturally make it *incredibly fucking embarrassing* to admit you asked ChatGPT something because actually using your brain to find real information was just too hard

Comments

rgodha.com•135 days ago

there's a bunch of apps that combine an LLM with actual Google searched websites that help reduce the hallucinations. it's not good enough to cite in an argument but it definitely is better at debugging code and stuff

00clank.bsky.social•136 days ago

The fact that GenAI text responses would rather say something incorrect than simply say ‘We don’t know’ is infuriating.
Until I see a 0% rate of false information from these things over the course of 2 years after we have 100% Clean Energy I will continue to ignore all GenAI search results.

justinbuist.bsky.social•136 days ago

I don't disagree. I see upsides to AI/LLMs that others don't but even from my perspective Gemini in the Google results is so crappy I don't even want to read it.

I might actually tweak my browser settings thanks to this comment. I let it ride for a while but it's never given me anything good.

00clank.bsky.social•136 days ago

I want these things to be harmless toys or helpful tools but until the environmental impact is handled and the issues of theft and accuracy are addressed, no thanks.
It is bewildering to me that proponents call GenAI being wrong ‘hallucinations’ and treat that as normal and not a deal-breaking flaw.

justinbuist.bsky.social•136 days ago

Keep in mind that the energy burned on AI in the US, not GenAI, all of it, including the stuff you use and don't know about, is 0.2% of the total grid.

Right on par with people playing PC computer games.

The difference is everybody in AI is trying to push power consumption down.

shaggadoo.bsky.social•136 days ago

Not true. I use it for coding, and the results work 90% of the time, saving hours of searching and waiting on forum replies.
Maybe asking for help is not "manly" enough, but that's how we survive as a society together...

taylorjrioux.bsky.social•136 days ago

I will never forget the time my son asked google if ankylosaurus could roll into a ball like an armadillo, and Google AI said YES.

When I looked for the source, it was literally a reddit post of things that were explicitly NOT true, but people wished they were

ranamar.bsky.social•136 days ago

To be fair, the string *was* on the page, and it'll cite anything that's more than about 10 words long.

celia-eels.bsky.social•136 days ago

Yes, it's the absolute confidence of the presentation that I'm sure makes it appealing but also makes it terrifying.

tempestarubida.bsky.social•136 days ago

Search engines search the real internet, but LLMs search a made-up conceptual space loosely based on training data.

justinbuist.bsky.social•136 days ago

That's where RAG comes in. Use the LLM transformer to vectorize the content into a high dimensional space and store that. Queries get the same treatment and you look for content that has vector entries that align with the query, then return results.

No need for any of the predictive tech.

word-geek.bsky.social•136 days ago

It's like this cartoon, in search form

nooneletgo.bsky.social•136 days ago

That is a superb way to put it.

ashleydoesartstuff.com•136 days ago

On that note, have a paper sent to me by a colleague.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

pathost.bsky.social•136 days ago

This is exactly how i have always felt about ChatGPT.

subtextexplainer.bsky.social•136 days ago

A simpler way to say this is "one is an actual search engine and the other just isn't"

normbrown.bsky.social•136 days ago

and the one that isn't will give you that weird maybe-an-answer at the same environmental cost of a major space launch

andrewhinton.bsky.social•136 days ago

Gets to the heart of the perennial tension in AI circles between “augmenting humans & human effort” vs “replacing” the same.
It’s just that the ownership class is very invested in the latter — because they hate paying people for labor.

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