• unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      ·
      7 months ago

      So you better spend your time adapting.

      They already ruined web search with SEO. Now it just won’t 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.

      That’s what you mean by adapt, right? Accept not having access to real information ever again?

    • Catoblepas
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      27
      ·
      7 months ago

      I’m not using “AI” in web searches no matter how much any VC bro’s 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.

    • u_tamtam@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      7 months ago

      I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ 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 haven’t 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 “babysitting” 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).

      • goldenbug@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 months ago

        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.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Yeah, but you can disagree with the way google does it and use alternatives. One of those alternatives could be a non-AI alternative.