• queermunist she/her
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches. Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending. AI is making web searches less useful by flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage. Also? Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me. Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?

    • ikt
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches

      Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we’re rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?

      Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending

      I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won’t as it’ll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers… so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:

      Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me

      Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:

      https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw

      When using social it’s summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:

      You can also use AI for language learning:

      https://morpheem.org/

      To quote Mistral 7b:

      A bubble in finance is when the price of an asset or security rises far above its true value due to speculation and hype, fueled by investors buying with the expectation of selling at a higher price. Prices rise based on market sentiment rather than fundamental value, creating a self-reinforcing cycle until enough investors realize the bubble’s unsustainability and sell, leading to a sharp decline in price and potential losses for those who bought during the bubble phase.

      I’m certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?

      In crypto it’s easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you’re talking about but a hype one?

      Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain’t going anywhere

      https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending

      Not only that but from all the examples I’ve given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):

      The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8

      Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886

      It’s hard to say it’s a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there

      Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?

      About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I’m not sure, I just search a bit more, there’s no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^

      • queermunist she/her
        link
        fedilink
        English
        0
        edit-2
        4 days ago

        I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?

        They’re investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren’t going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there’s no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can’t pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.

        NVIDIA will probably be fine though.

        Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:

        Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They’re just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It’s fine if you don’t really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.

        • ikt
          link
          fedilink
          English
          3
          edit-2
          4 days ago

          This is set up to be a massive crash.

          For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?

          Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air

          The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?

          or draw made up conclusions from real sources

          This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.

          Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.

          • queermunist she/her
            link
            fedilink
            English
            13 days ago

            For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?

            Open AI is going to implode after it goes for-profit. As for the others they’ll weather the storm, they have enough diversity in their assets to handle the AI bubble popping, but there will be big tech layoffs and lots of assets will get sold off to private equity.

            You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up?

            So what’s the point?

            This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.

            Rude. Wikipedia is, at least, peer reviewed by wikipedia editors. Chatbots don’t have that. They will just make shit up and you have to manually double check their sources yourself. At that point, why are you even using AI? It saved you no time or effort.

            This feels like having a conversation with someone inside a hype bubble. If Wikipedia already exists, what purpose does AI fulfill? It’s just a more expensive, more energy intensive way to do the exact same thing. There’s no profitability case. It’s useful, but it isn’t more useful than the much cheaper and much less energy/resource intensive alternatives. So, what’s the point?

            Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.

            Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point? You’re just using a massive amount of energy and compute for something that can be done much more efficiently.

            The only useful product I’ve seen come out of this is hype bubble is text-to-image models. Being able to tell a bot to generate an image is really interesting and useful for people without skills in creating or editing their own images. That’s an actual use case that could maybe justify the amount of resources being poured into it, it could maybe even be profitable.

            The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.

            • ikt
              link
              fedilink
              English
              11 hour ago

              Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point?

              Because it summarises the results, it’s like a search engine but better

              The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.

              I’m using it for coding in a way that it isn’t going anywhere, I’m using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they’ll continue to work.

              Example of what it looks like:

              It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:

              While originally it was constantly making mistakes there’s now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly

              So now I’ve got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that’s ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:

              https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

              song making

              https://suno.com/explore

              etcetc

              If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.

              • queermunist she/her
                link
                fedilink
                English
                154 minutes ago

                I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.

                As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.

                If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.

                If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.

                So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.

                If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.

                • ikt
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  1
                  edit-2
                  7 minutes ago

                  And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.

                  When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There’s plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia

                  Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!

                  The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.

                  If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web!

                  That’s not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I’m looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:

                  Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation

                  I get essentially what I’m looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I’m looking for is:

                  https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0

                  Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.

                  we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.

                  I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we’re starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models

                  DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).

                  For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs…

                  https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/deepseeks-new-ai-model-appears-to-be-one-of-the-best-open-challengers-yet/

                  *This could turn out to be wrong hence why I’m keeping an eye on it **I’m absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they’re spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them