• lemmylommy@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    No. Learn to become media literate. Just like looking at the preview of the first google result is not enough blindly trusting LLMs is a bad idea. And given how shitty google has become lately ChatGPT might be the lesser of two evils.

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      No.

      Yes.Using chatgpt as a search engine showcases a distinct lack of media literacy. It’s not an information resource. It’s a text generator. That’s it. If it lacks information, it will just make it up. That’s not something anyone should use as any kind of tool for learning or researching.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        Both the paid version of OpenAi and co-pilot are able to search the web if they don’t know about something.

        The biggest problem with the current models is that they aren’t very good at knowing when they don’t know something.

        The o1 preview actually solves this pretty well, But your average search takes north of 10 seconds.

        • lurklurk@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          They never know about something though. They are just text randomisers trained to generate plausible looking text

            • lurklurk@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              The problem isn’t that the model doesn’t know when it doesn’t know. The models never know. They’re text predictors. Sometimes the predictive text happens to be right, but the text predictor doesn’t know.

              • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                6 months ago

                So, let me get this straight. It’s your purpose in life, to find anytime anyone mentions the word know in any form of context to butt into the conversation with no helpful information or context to the message at hand and point out that AI isn’t alive (which is obvious to everyone) and say it’s just a text predictor (which is misleading at best)? Can someone help me crowdsource this poor soul a hobby?

      • lemmylommy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Well, inside that text generator lies useful information, as well as misinformation of course, because it has been trained on exactly that. Does it make shit up? Absolutely. But so do and did a lot of google or bing search results, even prior to the AI-slop-content farm era.

        And besides that, it is a fancy text generator that can use tools, such as searching bing (in case of ChatGPT) and summarizing search results. While not 100% accurate the summaries are usually fairly good.

        In my experience the combination of information in the LLM, web search and asking follow up questions and looking at the sources gives better and much faster results than sifting though search results manually.

        As long as you don’t take the first reply as gospel truth (as you should not do with the first google or bing result either) and you apply the appropriate amount of scrutiny based on the importance of your questions (as you should always do), ChatGPT is far superior to a classic web search. Which is, of course, where media literacy matters.

      • Gladaed@feddit.org
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        6 months ago

        You ate wrong. It is incredibly useful if the thing you are trying to Google has multiple meanings, e.g. how to kill a child. LLMs can help you figure out more specific search terms and where to look.

        • Ech@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          LLMs can help you figure out more specific search terms and where to look.

          Not knowing how to use a search engine properly doesn’t mean these sites are better. It just means you have more to learn.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

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

      Bruh did you ever went to 4chan or Reddit? The Internet turned to a dumpster fire long time before AI.

        • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          It’s still part of the Internet, if you can just pick and choose what Parts we are talking about, then the Internet ist still fine 🥸

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            But now all of the internet got incorporated into a magic 8-ball and when it gives you it’s random bullshit, you don’t know is it quoting anon from 4chan or a scientific paper or a journal or random assortment of words. And you don’t have any way to check it in confines of the system

    • GaiusBaltar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      To be fair, humans were already diluting it in a great sea of excrement, the robots just came to take our job and do it even faster and better.

    • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I mean google was already like this before GenAI.

      Its a nightmare to find anything you’re actually looking for and not SEO spam.

      Gen AI cuts out some of that noise but it has its own problems too.

      • JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You’d have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.

        And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.

        • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Oh yeah I remember the AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Dogpile days. I agree searxh has come a long way. I’m just saying Google used to be better in that old sweet spot.

  • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.org
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Ok but may I point you to the reality that internet spread misinformation is a critically bad problem at the moment

      • RDSM@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        And your argument is that a human will be better than an AI going through that? Because it seems unrelated to the initial argument.

    • Oka@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      I ask GPT for random junk all the time. If it’s important, I’ll double-check the results. I take any response with a grain of salt, though.

      • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You are spending more time and effort doing that than you would googling old fashioned way. And if you don’t check, you might as well throwing magic 8-ball, less damage to the environment, same accuracy

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            And some of those citations and quotes will be completely false and randomly generated, but they will sound very believable, so you don’t know truth from random fiction until you check every single one of them. At which point you should ask yourself why did you add unneccessary step of burning small portion of the rainforest to ask random word generator for stuff, when you could not do that and look for sources directly, saving that much time and energy

              • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                LLMs are great at cutting through noise

                Even that is not true. It doesn’t have aforementioned criteria for truth, you can’t make it have one.
                LLMs are great at generating noise that humans have hard time distinguishing from a text. Nothing else. There are indeed applications for it, but due to human nature, people think that since the text looks like something coherent, information contained will also be reliable, which is very, very dangerous.

            • PapstJL4U@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I, too, get the feeling, that the RoI is not there with LLM. Being able to include “site:” or “ext:” are more efficient.

              I just made another test: Kaba, just googling kaba gets you a german wiki article, explaining it means KAkao + BAnana

              chatgpt: It is the combination of the first syllables of KAkao and BEutel - Beutel is bag in german.

              It just made up the important part. On top of chatgpt says Kaba is a famous product in many countries, I am sure it is not.

              • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                You do have this issue, you can’t not have this issue, your LLM, no matter how big the model is and how much tooling you use, does not have criteria for truth. The fact that you made this invisible for you is worse, so much worse.

        • Oka@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          The latest GPT does search the internet to generate a response, so it’s currently a middleman to a search engine.

          • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            No it doesn’t. It incorporates unknown number of words from the internet into a machine which only purpose is to sound like a human. It’s an insanely complicated machine, but the truthfulness of the response not only never considered, but also is impossible to take as a deaired result.
            And the fact that so many people aren’t equipped to recognise it behind the way it talks could be buffling, but also very consistent with other choices humanity takes regularly.

      • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        So, if it isn’t important, you just want an answer, and you don’t care whether it’s correct or not?

        • 0oWow@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          The same can be said about the search results. For search results, you have to use your brain to determine what is correct and what is not. Now imagine for a moment if you were to use those same brain cells to determine if the AI needs a check.

          AI is just another way to process the search results, that happens to give you the correct answer up front, most of the time. If you go blindly trust it, that’s on you.

            • 0oWow@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              If you knew what the sources were, you wouldn’t have needed to search in the first place. Just because it’s on a reputable website does not make it legit. You still have to reason.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    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?