Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys’ thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)
I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of my find those threads and comments lol
I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don’t know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can’t replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the “best” way to find information, but I don’t know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)
I don’t know much about this topic, but I’m curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.
EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I’m not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can’t really continue everyone’s responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I’ll try to think of some follow up questions :)
I definitely think ai search engines are the next step. The way most people use Google is already a human readable prompt which gpt handles very well. We just need to improve the results and figure out a way for it to not steal and suppress the views from the websites.
Interesting, I think I agree with you on this. It could be better than traditional searching, but only if it is able to pull accurate organic content with sources. I think only then would it be more accurate and efficient than looking through forum-like platforms.
Discussions and comments are super important too so I guess it would have to pull sources that include that, which I guess could work? That’s super important for probably everything, because you might see comments that say
"add 1/4 c flour instead of 1/3 and it was perfect"or"I used this and it caused a spark in my usb port, here's what I did and my setup, take caution"or"if you use a 3 monitor setup though, be careful using 2 hdmi and 1 dp, for these reasons, 3 dp is better for these reasons"or"if you want a more efficient way to farm this item, talk to this npc and do this quest instead"etc (I just made those up for examples) - but the point is that people comment on posts with tweaks, improvements, warnings, positive feedback, negative feedback, etc. That’s super valuable for making a final decision on your own about the problem, which is partially why I don’t think AI will ever be the most successful way to find information, because I don’t know if it can achieve this more efficiently than forum-like platforms