autotldr@lemmings.world
on 13 May 2024 19:00
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Kimber Matherneâs thriving food blog draws millions of visitors each month searching for last-minute dinner ideas.
But the mother of three says decisions made at Google, more than 2,000 miles from her home in the Florida panhandle, are threatening her business.
About 40 percent of visits to her blog, Easy Family Recipes, come through the search engine, which has for more than two decades served as the clearinghouse of the internet, sending users to hundreds of millions of websites each day.
â
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unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 May 2024 19:34
nextcollapse
AI in web search is not going anywhere. Deal with it.
This force is unstoppable, whether you like it or not. So you better spend your time adapting.
They already ruined web search with SEO. Now it just wonât be worth searching for websites at all. We can either accept whatever nonsense the syntax generator spits out, untethered from fact, or we can stop looking altogether.
Thatâs what you mean by adapt, right? Accept not having access to real information ever again?
abbadon420@lemm.ee
on 13 May 2024 20:41
nextcollapse
Yeah, but you can disagree with the way google does it and use alternatives. One of those alternatives could be a non-AI alternative.
u_tamtam@programming.dev
on 13 May 2024 21:09
nextcollapse
Iâd like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to âdeal withâ isnât âAIâ (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniquesâŚ) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for âsounding convincingâ, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humansâ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.
I also havenât seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of âbabysittingâ the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).
Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).
but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for âsounding convincingâ, without care for correctness or truthfulness.
I think that Iâd put it in a slightly less-loaded way, and say that an LLM just produces content that has similar properties to its training content.
The problem is real. Frankly, while I think that there are a lot of things that existing LLM systems are surprisingly good at, I am not at all sure that replacing search engines will be it (though I am confident that in the long run, some form of AI system will be).
What you canât do with systems like the ones today is to take one data source and another data source that have conflicting information and then have the LLM-using AI create a âdeep understandingâ of each and then evaluate which is more-likely truthful in the context of other things that have been accepted as true. Humans do something like that (and the human approach isnât infallible either, though Iâd call it a lot more capable).
But that doesnât mean that you canât use heuristics for estimating the accuracy of data and that might be enough to solve a lot of problems. Like, I might decide that 4Chan should maybe have less-weight as a solution, or text that ranks highly on a âsarcasticâ sentiment analysis program should have less weight. And I can train the AI to learn such weightings based on human scoring of the text that it generates.
Also, Iâm pretty sure that an LLM-based system could attach a âconfidence ratingâ to text it outputs, and that might also solve a lot of issues.
goldenbug@kbin.social
on 14 May 2024 04:39
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I'm currently wondering what their plans are for updating these LLMs.
Who wants to create the content to feed these machines without a recognition, retribution or a perceived act of 'good'? If I were to maintain a blog with a particular midly but important obscure topic, would I devote the time to have ChatGPT or Copilot make a summary?
Now, the LLMs need to ingest a lot more than 'one blog'... If someome knows, please let me know.
I doubt this crazy effort with such resource consumption is to create a snapshot of what the internet was in the 2020s.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 13 May 2024 22:46
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Iâm not using âAIâ in web searches no matter how much any VC broâs golden parachute depends on it, sorry. Refusing to partake or even using tools to filter out LLM trash are perfectly fine ways to adapt to search engines leaning on AI hype to try to convince you that their inability to combat SEO spam is good, actually.
I am pretty confident that in the long run, pretty much everyone is gonna wind up there, though. Like, part of the time spent searching is identifying information on the page and combining from multiple sources. Having the computer do that is gonna be faster than a human.
There are gonna be problems, like attributability of the original source, poisoning AIs via getting malicious information into their training data, citing the material yourself, and so forth. But I donât think that those are gonna be insurmountable.
Itâs actually kind of interesting how much using something like an LLM looks like Project Babel in the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. The AI there was very explicit that it didnât have reasoning capability, could just take natural-language queries, find information, combine it, and produce a human-format answer. But it couldnât make judgement calls or do independent reasoning, and regularly rejected queries that required that.
Though that was intended as an academic tool, not something for the masses, and it was excellent at citing sources, which the existing LLM-based systems are awful at.
Are there any search engines other than perplexity that tie the sources to sections rather than just popping them all at the bottom? That always felt like the most practical layout for being able to easily cross-check information against their supposed sources.
GammaGames@beehaw.org
on 13 May 2024 19:43
nextcollapse
Not that I know of, but perplexityâs is pretty good from my experience!
Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
on 14 May 2024 01:49
collapse
not a fan of brave as a company, but their ai search does that.
reallyzen@lemmy.ml
on 13 May 2024 21:10
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DDG has itâs non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it
Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries arenât harvested for further ai training
In any case, itâs a completely different tab, itâs not mingled in general search results
DDGâs AI chat isnât a search engine. Itâs just a chat interface for GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude, without any search access. Itâs also not very up to date.
GPT-3.5 Turbo:
Who is the PM of the UK?
As of my last update, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is Boris Johnson. Please note that political positions can change, so I recommend checking the latest news sources for the most up-to-date information.
Is Queen Elizabeth still alive?
Yes, as of my last update, Queen Elizabeth II is still alive.
The Claude version doesnât fare any better:
Is Queen Elizabeth still alive?
Yes, Queen Elizabeth II is still alive. She is the current and longest-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, having ascended to the throne in 1952. As of 2023, she is 96 years old.
reallyzen@lemmy.ml
on 14 May 2024 04:50
nextcollapse
You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentlemanâs agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in itâs public chats.
I tried them on a topic Iâm pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.
The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a ânatural languageâ query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldnât give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!
averyminya@beehaw.org
on 14 May 2024 05:26
collapse
These are never the sort of answers I would want to ask AI for anyway (not a slight against your example, this is a common thing I see).
@u_tamtam@programming.dev
I also havenât seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case:
For general temporary facts I would agree. Even Amazonâs surmized reviews, it can be handy to know that âAdhesive issuesâ is commonly sighted⌠but Iâd learn that from reading the reviews anyway⌠Like, a lot of the time it comes down to AI being used when the human should do their own due diligence. I will even admit to this in the very next paragraph.
I find AI to be especially good at things I am not, like math. I am very good at estimations, and I can work out some stuff over time. However, I am much slower compared to asking âI currently make 2.1-Z a month and I have 397-Z earning that interest. I would like to make 65-Z a month, how much do I need earning interest to make that?â (Roughly 13,100 btw) and getting that answer along with the formula showing its work. It spits out the answer in the amount of time it took me to work out that verbal question, both of which were far faster than the time it takes me to pull up a calculator and do the same math. Itâs not that I canât, it just takes a lot of time that could be better spent actually doing the thing I want to do, which is how many months based off what I earn will it take to reach that number.
Similarly, this reigns true for a lot of things with âfacts.â Perpetual facts or immutable facts are the best use for AI. In my opinion based on experience, of course.
A fact about a song will always be in the key it was created in. A key will always have a specific set of scales that can be used with it. Math will always be the answer to an equation. These are, for the most part, immutable facts. A person on the other hand, will not always be their age, or even living, nor will their net worth stay the same. Letâs not even get started on the weather! These are temporary facts.
Quite a few people tend to ask AI temporary facts (rightfully so, itâs what we would like to do on a day to day basis for casual questions), but and it gets a lot of flack for not doing a great job at it (again rightfully so since itâs a basic question.) But I have found that AI is actually quite strong at perpetual facts. When time is short and at the end of the day I just want to jam to my favorite songs, I can get a quick reminder of the key and scales I can use to play along with. On my own I know and can remember these things, but asking a question and getting an answer possibly even faster is really nice.
Not to be pro-AI â In this case I really think it comes down to using the tool you have. We live in the present and the future, so it seems ridiculous to rely on something trained on data rooted in the past and expecting that it will always be that. Hence, immutable facts tending to be more reliable to work with when using AI.
I like tech, so I have used and played with local LLMâs and Stable Diffusion models and worked on a model based on my own art of Zentangles, I donât think I would ever actively rely on this technology for anything more than cursory fun when Iâm short on time and energy, or as a supplement to something that I, frankly, am going to take far too long to learn and will forget in the span of a couple months when I no longer need it. I donât exactly feel the need to memorize the 300,000 Excel sheet tricks, but I will sure as shit ask BarGemeni about it. Using it to confirm my estimations to see that I was roughly accurate compared to an AI that is roughly accurate is good enough for me for some quick and dirty math.
Ultimately thatâs what the LLM-AI debate is for me. Relying on it for anything that is ever changing, using it for anything more than just basic fun is setting yourself up for a bad time. Using it here and there as a calculator or for some non-important details about something that has remained static since the dawn of time? You can net yourself some pretty nice futuristic âHell yeahâsâ. Packing these things up into little boxes like supplanting a phone (or adding it to your phone), using it to create non-existent support (both support staff and supporting terrible products to trick people into buying it), or adding it to rice cookers and refrigerators is⌠the direction expected but not the one I was hoping for.
darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org
on 14 May 2024 09:52
collapse
Unless everyone stops using Google, trying to stop this is like fighting windmills.
threaded - newest
đ¤ Iâm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Kimber Matherneâs thriving food blog draws millions of visitors each month searching for last-minute dinner ideas. But the mother of three says decisions made at Google, more than 2,000 miles from her home in the Florida panhandle, are threatening her business. About 40 percent of visits to her blog, Easy Family Recipes, come through the search engine, which has for more than two decades served as the clearinghouse of the internet, sending users to hundreds of millions of websites each day. â Saved 0% of original text.
AI in web search is not going anywhere. Deal with it.
This force is unstoppable, whether you like it or not. So you better spend your time adapting.
They already ruined web search with SEO. Now it just wonât be worth searching for websites at all. We can either accept whatever nonsense the syntax generator spits out, untethered from fact, or we can stop looking altogether.
Thatâs what you mean by adapt, right? Accept not having access to real information ever again?
Yeah, but you can disagree with the way google does it and use alternatives. One of those alternatives could be a non-AI alternative.
Iâd like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to âdeal withâ isnât âAIâ (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniquesâŚ) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for âsounding convincingâ, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humansâ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.
I also havenât seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of âbabysittingâ the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).
Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).
I think that Iâd put it in a slightly less-loaded way, and say that an LLM just produces content that has similar properties to its training content.
The problem is real. Frankly, while I think that there are a lot of things that existing LLM systems are surprisingly good at, I am not at all sure that replacing search engines will be it (though I am confident that in the long run, some form of AI system will be).
What you canât do with systems like the ones today is to take one data source and another data source that have conflicting information and then have the LLM-using AI create a âdeep understandingâ of each and then evaluate which is more-likely truthful in the context of other things that have been accepted as true. Humans do something like that (and the human approach isnât infallible either, though Iâd call it a lot more capable).
But that doesnât mean that you canât use heuristics for estimating the accuracy of data and that might be enough to solve a lot of problems. Like, I might decide that 4Chan should maybe have less-weight as a solution, or text that ranks highly on a âsarcasticâ sentiment analysis program should have less weight. And I can train the AI to learn such weightings based on human scoring of the text that it generates.
Also, Iâm pretty sure that an LLM-based system could attach a âconfidence ratingâ to text it outputs, and that might also solve a lot of issues.
I'm currently wondering what their plans are for updating these LLMs.
Who wants to create the content to feed these machines without a recognition, retribution or a perceived act of 'good'? If I were to maintain a blog with a particular midly but important obscure topic, would I devote the time to have ChatGPT or Copilot make a summary?
Now, the LLMs need to ingest a lot more than 'one blog'... If someome knows, please let me know.
I doubt this crazy effort with such resource consumption is to create a snapshot of what the internet was in the 2020s.
Iâm not using âAIâ in web searches no matter how much any VC broâs golden parachute depends on it, sorry. Refusing to partake or even using tools to filter out LLM trash are perfectly fine ways to adapt to search engines leaning on AI hype to try to convince you that their inability to combat SEO spam is good, actually.
I can believe that it wonât happen in 2024.
I am pretty confident that in the long run, pretty much everyone is gonna wind up there, though. Like, part of the time spent searching is identifying information on the page and combining from multiple sources. Having the computer do that is gonna be faster than a human.
There are gonna be problems, like attributability of the original source, poisoning AIs via getting malicious information into their training data, citing the material yourself, and so forth. But I donât think that those are gonna be insurmountable.
Itâs actually kind of interesting how much using something like an LLM looks like Project Babel in the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. The AI there was very explicit that it didnât have reasoning capability, could just take natural-language queries, find information, combine it, and produce a human-format answer. But it couldnât make judgement calls or do independent reasoning, and regularly rejected queries that required that.
Though that was intended as an academic tool, not something for the masses, and it was excellent at citing sources, which the existing LLM-based systems are awful at.
Are there any search engines other than perplexity that tie the sources to sections rather than just popping them all at the bottom? That always felt like the most practical layout for being able to easily cross-check information against their supposed sources.
Not that I know of, but perplexityâs is pretty good from my experience!
not a fan of brave as a company, but their ai search does that.
DDG has itâs non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it
Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries arenât harvested for further ai training
In any case, itâs a completely different tab, itâs not mingled in general search results
DDGâs AI chat isnât a search engine. Itâs just a chat interface for GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude, without any search access. Itâs also not very up to date.
GPT-3.5 Turbo:
The Claude version doesnât fare any better:
You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentlemanâs agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in itâs public chats.
I tried them on a topic Iâm pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.
The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a ânatural languageâ query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldnât give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!
These are never the sort of answers I would want to ask AI for anyway (not a slight against your example, this is a common thing I see).
@u_tamtam@programming.dev
For general temporary facts I would agree. Even Amazonâs surmized reviews, it can be handy to know that âAdhesive issuesâ is commonly sighted⌠but Iâd learn that from reading the reviews anyway⌠Like, a lot of the time it comes down to AI being used when the human should do their own due diligence. I will even admit to this in the very next paragraph.
I find AI to be especially good at things I am not, like math. I am very good at estimations, and I can work out some stuff over time. However, I am much slower compared to asking âI currently make 2.1-Z a month and I have 397-Z earning that interest. I would like to make 65-Z a month, how much do I need earning interest to make that?â (Roughly 13,100 btw) and getting that answer along with the formula showing its work. It spits out the answer in the amount of time it took me to work out that verbal question, both of which were far faster than the time it takes me to pull up a calculator and do the same math. Itâs not that I canât, it just takes a lot of time that could be better spent actually doing the thing I want to do, which is how many months based off what I earn will it take to reach that number.
Similarly, this reigns true for a lot of things with âfacts.â Perpetual facts or immutable facts are the best use for AI. In my opinion based on experience, of course.
A fact about a song will always be in the key it was created in. A key will always have a specific set of scales that can be used with it. Math will always be the answer to an equation. These are, for the most part, immutable facts. A person on the other hand, will not always be their age, or even living, nor will their net worth stay the same. Letâs not even get started on the weather! These are temporary facts.
Quite a few people tend to ask AI temporary facts (rightfully so, itâs what we would like to do on a day to day basis for casual questions), but and it gets a lot of flack for not doing a great job at it (again rightfully so since itâs a basic question.) But I have found that AI is actually quite strong at perpetual facts. When time is short and at the end of the day I just want to jam to my favorite songs, I can get a quick reminder of the key and scales I can use to play along with. On my own I know and can remember these things, but asking a question and getting an answer possibly even faster is really nice.
Not to be pro-AI â In this case I really think it comes down to using the tool you have. We live in the present and the future, so it seems ridiculous to rely on something trained on data rooted in the past and expecting that it will always be that. Hence, immutable facts tending to be more reliable to work with when using AI.
I like tech, so I have used and played with local LLMâs and Stable Diffusion models and worked on a model based on my own art of Zentangles, I donât think I would ever actively rely on this technology for anything more than cursory fun when Iâm short on time and energy, or as a supplement to something that I, frankly, am going to take far too long to learn and will forget in the span of a couple months when I no longer need it. I donât exactly feel the need to memorize the 300,000 Excel sheet tricks, but I will sure as shit ask BarGemeni about it. Using it to confirm my estimations to see that I was roughly accurate compared to an AI that is roughly accurate is good enough for me for some quick and dirty math.
Ultimately thatâs what the LLM-AI debate is for me. Relying on it for anything that is ever changing, using it for anything more than just basic fun is setting yourself up for a bad time. Using it here and there as a calculator or for some non-important details about something that has remained static since the dawn of time? You can net yourself some pretty nice futuristic âHell yeahâsâ. Packing these things up into little boxes like supplanting a phone (or adding it to your phone), using it to create non-existent support (both support staff and supporting terrible products to trick people into buying it), or adding it to rice cookers and refrigerators is⌠the direction expected but not the one I was hoping for.
Unless everyone stops using Google, trying to stop this is like fighting windmills.