[HN Gopher] AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
        
       Author : jiwidi
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2022-12-25 21:31 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (iai.tv)
 (TXT) w3m dump (iai.tv)
        
       | kewrkewm53 wrote:
       | Right now I find ChatGTP excellent for certain technical topics
       | I'm familiar with, but can't recall the details. It saves me the
       | time of looking for an example from stackoverflow/tutorial
       | blogs/official documentation, and gives me just the piece I want
       | - things like syntax, which libraries/modules to use etc.
        
         | geoffreypoirier wrote:
         | Completely agree. It's my fast rust remover for when diving
         | back in, plus gives me the strong leads on docs, syntax,
         | modules.
        
       | type4 wrote:
       | It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-
       | checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is
       | much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results
       | can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the
       | subject matter already, you won't really know that.
       | 
       | That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for
       | stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double
       | checking the output to see how it's wrong.
        
         | m_mueller wrote:
         | and by extension: the ability and expression of doubt /
         | humility. knowing what you don't know is when you reach a
         | certain maturity, which so far all these AIs seem to lack.
        
           | forrestthewoods wrote:
           | That's not particularly different from comments on HackerNews
           | and Reddit. There's a lot of extremely confident and very
           | wrong answers on both sites!
           | 
           | ChatGPT is probably more wrong more often, by a good margin.
           | But I don't think the argument "it's confidently wrong"
           | carries any weight. Humans are extremely susceptible to
           | humans who display confidence. It'd probably be a good thing
           | if humans were as skeptical of confident humans as they need
           | to be of confident chat/search bots.
        
         | smadge wrote:
         | The problem is that fact checking functionality is a harder
         | NLP/ML problem than bullshit generation.
        
       | maremmano wrote:
       | Sundararajan is it you?
       | 
       | unfortunately (or fortunately) it is a matter of time.
        
       | n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
       | I agree that chat bots aren't the proper modality for replacing
       | search. So what? Currently, Google search results stink. ChatGPT
       | results are way better in a number of domains. Does it need to be
       | a chat bot? No. But Google still stinks now. I'll take anything
       | that can just find the correct information.
        
         | lerchmo wrote:
         | Google search results are a vortex of perverse incentives and
         | double dipping. The fact that google ranks horrible CPM
         | arbitrage websites for nearly everything AND monetizes these
         | websites... yuck. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to imagine
         | how some of these AI Models could leverage a search index +
         | something like wolfram alpha to generate a much more targeted
         | and valuable search result.
        
           | joe_the_user wrote:
           | _it doesn 't take a rocket scientist to imagine how some of
           | these AI Models could leverage a search index + something
           | like wolfram alpha to generate a much more targeted and
           | valuable search result._
           | 
           | Sure but the problem with the rocket scientists is they think
           | about how good things can be, not how evil they can be. Sure,
           | a chat bot could be made to give very valuable-to the end
           | user results but as it will free like Google, results
           | yielding-profits-to-company will be given, in the fashion you
           | describe Google doing.
        
             | lerchmo wrote:
             | That is the back side of the arc, the (maybe inevitable)
             | decline into collecting monopoly profits. I think people
             | are excited about these language models as way to crack the
             | Monopoly with something that delivers more value to users.
        
         | joe_the_user wrote:
         | Google certainly sinks for my purposes. But these current
         | results are exactly what happens a company carefully calculates
         | the monetization involved in retrieving information. Open AI
         | isn't calculating the monetization of ChatGPT's answers and
         | doesn't have a real business plan (paid chat won't go further
         | than paid search imo). The thing is, once Open AI engages in
         | the calculations done by Google, having the results seem to
         | come from an "intelligence" can only make the effect worse
         | (though I suspect Google will also tend to look like an
         | intelligence/chatbot too as things progress, the future looks
         | ugly)
        
         | megablast wrote:
         | Google has ruined the web. Look what they did to recipe sites??
         | Truly awful.
         | 
         | And there used to be sites that answered the question on the
         | search page. Google pushed them to the bottom.
        
           | lerchmo wrote:
           | Yeah, they are responsible for those 5 minute scroll sessions
           | above the recipes. They rank and monetize those horrible
           | sites.
        
           | dpkirchner wrote:
           | I've stopped using unqualified Google searches for recipes.
           | Limiting results to allrecipes.com helps a fair amount
           | (they're a pretty unobnoxious site as things go). It's
           | telling that Google doesn't rank them higher.
        
         | charcircuit wrote:
         | How does Google stink? I've never had an issue with. What query
         | does it struggle with?
        
         | williamtrask wrote:
         | This is a great point.
         | 
         | Followup question - is LLM tech more or less likely to end up
         | replacing search when those same incentives really saturate the
         | LLM product itself.
         | 
         | One big difference seems to be attribution. LLMs don't tell you
         | where their info comes from. They just say what is (but can be
         | asked to cite works - with mixed results).
         | 
         | Will LLMs get good at citing sources and if not will people
         | care or will they give in to LLMs as a source of information
         | that's "good enough because it mostly works"
         | 
         | From a product placement / ads perspective, being able to
         | persuade people to fully accept everything an ad-infused LLM
         | says because it's good enough seems like an incredibly
         | lucrative product bundling opportunity if they can get it
         | right. Esp. If they can use that to convince regulators they
         | can't annotate the difference between ads and non ads.
         | 
         | Seems pretty dystopian from a disinformation perspective
         | though.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | Without wanting to be facetious, the single word response that
       | comes to mind is "yet".
        
       | joe_the_user wrote:
       | Google is more "chatty" than it was a few years ago and ChatGPT
       | is a quickly moving target it seems - it's answers seem more
       | "search-like" than they seemed when I started playing with it
       | just a few weeks ago (more caveats and more likely to give
       | multiple options, etc). It seems like we'll have fusion soon.
       | 
       | I agree the results will be unpleasant. I already despise
       | Google's fucking "looks like there aren't many results" message
       | and there will be more to hate down the road. But still,
       | appearing to give "an answer" rather than reporting information
       | seems like a winning quality to bring in the masses. As someone
       | pointed out, Google's target audience is inherently those
       | credulous enough to be valuable targets for their advertisers.
        
       | mc32 wrote:
       | The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on
       | eggshells.
       | 
       | It can't give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in
       | nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not
       | add value to an answer and actually makes the search more
       | tedious.
       | 
       | If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it
       | begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod
       | it to finally give me government statistics but it doest it
       | begrudgingly. And that's for a far away country not steeped in
       | any unusual crime controversy.
        
         | permo-w wrote:
         | you can say a lot about Google, but at least they've never sat
         | down and said "no more porn", or blocked specific words from
         | being searched, which is a little surprising actually. I'm sure
         | bigger advertisers will have broached the subject on many
         | occasions
        
       | nomel wrote:
       | A chat bot isn't allowed to use external APIs or present things
       | besides conversational text? Seems short sighted.
       | 
       | Todays chat bots should be considered dumb prototypes, when
       | thinking about even the near future.
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | Today's chatbots are complex language models based on the
         | language that they were trained on.
         | 
         | They are very clever at transforming data into language, or one
         | language into another... but they work on _language_ and not
         | _knowledge_.
         | 
         | It would be interesting to see a language model identify the
         | necessary resources to fulfill a query which is then fed back
         | into it to transform the dry data back into language.
         | Identify if the question is looking for weather, sports scores,
         | unit conversion, general knowlege, or business information for
         | the following requests:              1. "What is the high
         | temperature tommorow?"         2. "Did the packers win last
         | night?"         3. "What time does Walmart open?"         4.
         | "What will it rain next week?"         5. "Where can I buy an
         | umbrella?"         6. "How many feet are in a mile?"
         | Question classification:
         | 
         | To which GPT responded:                   1. Weather         2.
         | Sports Scores         3. Business Information         4.
         | Weather         5. Business Information         6. Unit
         | Conversion
         | 
         | Using this, it should then be sent to a system that knows how
         | to do those queries and return back data.
         | 
         | However, doing that integration isn't the place for today's
         | chatbots - or at least not the place for OpenAI to be trying to
         | do all the possible things. Those queries _also_ cost money and
         | become harder to bill for.
        
           | lerchmo wrote:
           | I mean you can give chatgtp API docs and it will write the
           | actual code to find the answers.
        
             | shagie wrote:
             | Do you trust it to write that bug free?
             | 
             | Where are you putting the API key to access those services?
             | 
             | Where does it run the code that it wrote and how does it
             | provision those resources?
        
         | christmaspizza wrote:
         | Yeah this is a weird take. Chat bots are improving rapidly,
         | increasingly used in real applications. With more targeted
         | applications, like a "search engine" for coding, I could see
         | these being very powerful. It's weird to write an article
         | discounting that based on how the current ChatGPT application,
         | a research beta, operates and throwing out some fear-based
         | morality.
        
       | userbinator wrote:
       | They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are
       | turning into AI chatbots too.
       | 
       | When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet",
       | not an "AI".
       | 
       | Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components
       | is the most prominent application where search engines like
       | Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going
       | to work there either.
        
         | enlyth wrote:
         | A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users
         | want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who
         | structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I
         | tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of
         | what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots")
         | 
         | I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of
         | more technical search engine for developers and the classic
         | Google experience where some neural network tries to make sense
         | of your poorly written human language phrased question
        
           | rtkwe wrote:
           | We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because
           | sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to
           | get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation
           | at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going
           | back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.
        
       | skwirl wrote:
       | Mods need to edit the headline of this to match the title of the
       | page. Nothing stating or implying this headline appear in the
       | article and it feels like an attempt to troll HN.
        
       | asimjalis wrote:
       | Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as
       | well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT
       | experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT.
       | 
       | Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis.
       | ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental
       | bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.
        
         | kyleyeats wrote:
         | "Have you tried Bing? It's great for questions like this."
        
       | halukakin wrote:
       | Today I experienced just the opposite. Chatgpt answered some
       | business questions in less than a minute. I would have spent 30
       | mins in seo optimized sites to find the exact same info.
        
         | kmoser wrote:
         | It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT is monetized to slip
         | in some paid content, similar to product placement. Until then,
         | I'm sure bright minds are already working on ways to ensure it
         | feeds on data tainted with their own agendas.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | How do you verify that chatgpt answers are correct? (And to be
         | honest, how do you gauge the correctness of random internet
         | sites)?
        
           | TOMDM wrote:
           | To speak to GP's point, a number of times already I've failed
           | to find something immediately on Google, asked chatgpt,
           | gotten an answer and then used Google to verify chatgpt's
           | answer.
           | 
           | Google is great if you already know exactly what you're
           | looking for, for a lot of topics chatgpt is already better
           | than Google if you don't
        
       | mustafabisic1 wrote:
       | But they have the potential. We'll see if it breaks into public.
       | 
       | People at some point were even saying Tikto will replace search
       | engines.
       | 
       | Both of which can still happen.
        
         | cactusplant7374 wrote:
         | I don't think they do. At least not in a safe way. The AI
         | doesn't understand meaning or the underlying material and
         | concepts. I'm sure filters will be put into a pipeline but it
         | will never be as good as letting the human sniff out the
         | correct answers.
        
           | lerchmo wrote:
           | "Will never be" is an overly confident statement for any
           | technical field. Predicting the future is hard and predicting
           | the future with an un-bounded time horizon is pretty near
           | impossible.
        
           | forgotusername6 wrote:
           | Today I asked chatGPT what Einstein's favourite food was. It
           | gave a reasonable answer about him liking simple foods. The
           | worrying thing is that I was satisfied with the result. It
           | was plausible. It could well be true. There is a good chance
           | that this kind of AI might provide the right kind of response
           | that a large percentage of the public find convincing enough
           | to not bother with additional research.
        
             | eastbound wrote:
             | The universal truth for people is often different than the
             | truth, and AI has to return the convenient truth.
             | 
             | Example. People are persuaded that women can do two things
             | at the same time and men cannot. Despite countless
             | counterexamples, the original study positioning everyone on
             | a bell curve with only 6% difference in time of execution,
             | and without checking for the quality of the results ("254
             | plus 786 equals 126 quick mafs!!!"), it is blatantly false,
             | but any search engine that would return that it is false
             | would make itself rejected by humans.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | This reminds me of an article about how phones killed
             | ripley's believe it or not and the Guinness book of records
             | - both of which are kind of like "solidified" bar
             | conversation. Now if someone at the bar asks about
             | Einstein's favorite foods, people just whip out phones and
             | find an answer (doesn't even have to be correct) and the
             | conversation ends. Before you could go all night discussing
             | it from attempts at first principles - you might be
             | entirely wrong but you had fun.
        
           | nomel wrote:
           | Are we talking about chat bots, or their implementations in
           | 2022?
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | KhoomeiK wrote:
       | Recent paper showing how LMs "struggle with less popular factual
       | knowledge, and that scaling fails to appreciably improve
       | memorization of factual knowledge in the tail". In other words,
       | simply scaling LLMs will not result in replacing Google as a
       | search engine. Approaches like theirs ie retrieval augmentation
       | are needed.
       | 
       | https://akariasai.github.io/files/llm_memorization.pdf
       | 
       | This is essentially what I'm building for the content marketing
       | vertical.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | TOMDM wrote:
       | Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11.
       | 
       | Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless.
       | 
       | I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I
       | clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it
       | so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to
       | mute the windows hard stop sound.
       | 
       | For situations where you don't really know what you're looking
       | for, chatgpt is already competitive with Google. Failing
       | abysmally in some cases, and far surpassing Google in others.
        
       | yakattak wrote:
       | I worked on a chat bot to help solve technical issues. It would
       | parse what the user wanted and then search the already
       | established articles we had that were ingested into
       | Elasticsearch.
       | 
       | At first, we started with a goal of fully conversational AI. So,
       | for example, it would ask a question based on the article and
       | give you a choice, you could then type your choice. This became a
       | nightmare for the model so we added buttons instead.
       | 
       | Then, before we knew it, this "bot" was just a glorified search
       | engine that feigned being a bot. Towards the end of it I
       | scratched my head and said "did we even replace the current
       | knowledgebase? are we spending thousands on something that adds
       | no value?"
       | 
       | I don't think chatbots are it either. I think we could have just
       | replaced the KB search with Elasticsearch and been done with it,
       | no need for any ML.
        
         | thexumaker wrote:
         | Yep had the same realization a while back building something
         | similar for our internal docs on notion for a hackathon. I
         | realized that if notion just had a better search engine we
         | wouldn't need anything else built on top
        
         | nunodonato wrote:
         | Can you elaborate on what the problem was? What became a
         | nightmare for the model?
        
       | forrestthewoods wrote:
       | Counter-point: Yes they are. I'm already successfully using
       | ChatGPT as a Google replacement for many types of searches.
       | 
       | You're welcome to argue it isn't a replacement. And yet my own
       | two eyes observe indisputable evidence to the contrary.
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | When ChatGPT came out I used it to do 100 hours worth of work in
       | 10 hours or so. But it still felt like work. And for more
       | intricate use cases it is just easier to do traditional research.
       | 
       | We're safe for a while still. And when I say we I mean writers.
        
       | ArjenM wrote:
       | It's like putting a dusty book back on the digital shelve, now
       | you need to have a conversation to do a simple search query
       | that's hidden in marketing gibberish?
       | 
       | I'm, still seeing the whole push in this product range hang with
       | the call to make the search functions of most search engines more
       | garbage than the actual chatbot.
       | 
       | As if Marketing is steering this ship.
       | 
       | I'm sticking to my own knowledge and trusted independent sources
       | for now, no need to have something make up an entire world for
       | you, just to trap you in a cage of ones own making for real this
       | time?
        
       | gkoberger wrote:
       | I mean, ChatGPT came out 2 weeks ago.
       | 
       | By the time Google even was started, Excite had been searching
       | the web for 7 years and Lycos had been around for 3 years.
       | 
       | I don't think it's a 1:1 replacement, but let's not judge a
       | product that's been out for less than a month against a trillion
       | dollar behemoth that launched 24 years ago.
        
       | gumboza wrote:
       | They're not a replacement but they will be generating so much
       | credible indexable garbage that they will reduce the signal to
       | noise ratio to the point that they are useless.
        
       | KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
       | They absolutely are, whoever wrote this has no idea what they're
       | talking about.
        
       | tobyhinloopen wrote:
       | Maybe not, but it's already very useful.
        
       | NicoJuicy wrote:
       | What I haven't seen here, is that AI chatbots remove the
       | discovery process.
       | 
       | While you can get an option from a chatbot for your specific
       | request, sometimes you can get something better while googling
       | for possible solutions.
        
       | gvurrdon wrote:
       | Assuming this refers to https://chat.openai.com/, it's rather
       | difficult to try it out. After creating an account it demanded a
       | phone number. Of course, I will not supply my own, and temporary
       | ones I tried were either recognised as such or rejected has
       | having already been used.
        
       | gukov wrote:
       | The way I see it:
       | 
       | - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of
       | documents
       | 
       | - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect
       | document based on millions of the documents
       | 
       | To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially
       | with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others
       | currently.
       | 
       | I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am
       | ready to pay for something like ChatGPT.
       | 
       | Google has an issue on their hands and is probably working
       | overtime to lobby the threat of ChatGPT away.
        
         | dilap wrote:
         | ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask:
         | 
         | "What's a good social website for people of a technical bent"
         | 
         | It recommended: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Quora,
         | LinkedIn, ResearchGate, GitHub
         | 
         | That's a pretty good list!
         | 
         | Tried the same search on Google, and the first result was some
         | spammy site "15 top social networks," #1 being facebook. Not
         | very useful.
         | 
         | I definitely think chatbots will replace many uses of search
         | engines. It's already way more useful for lots of stuff for me.
        
           | williamtrask wrote:
           | It's not that google can't do this. It's that the incentives
           | prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there's a plausible
           | way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel
           | real.
        
           | gukov wrote:
           | Another way to look at ChatGPT is it being a smart RSS
           | reader. It's the way it discards all the WordPress layout
           | junk giving you just the meat in a text format.
           | 
           | The biggest advantage Google currently has is their massive
           | indexing ability. ChatGPT is oblivious to something that just
           | happened (ie was posted) an hour ago, a day ago, heck, a
           | month ago.
        
         | forrest2 wrote:
         | There is flywheel issue with generative search: content
         | producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get
         | paid.
         | 
         | People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives
         | traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that
         | snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages
         | are already not appreciated by indexed websites.
         | 
         | If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will
         | eventually see severe public info stagnation until alternative
         | business models can grow around it or avoid it altogether. I
         | suspect we'll see more platforms like Spotify for X and a
         | continued shift toward subscription platforms and youtube.
         | 
         | Of course, what's to stop the bots from watching all of
         | Netflix, listening to every podcast, etc? It will be an
         | interesting decade for law / regulation / licensing.
        
           | EGreg wrote:
           | Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by
           | believable content generated by swarms of internet bots.
           | 
           | Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it
           | will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine
           | 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on
           | social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running
           | for president. Nevermind that he wasn't born in the USA...
           | somehow mysteriously none of them address it:
           | 
           | Yes it is here and it's already being spread but that is just
           | a tiny sliver of what will happen in the next 5 years:
           | https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg
           | 
           | Such stuff can be used to move markets, pump and dump assets
           | and even start new wars!
        
         | WJW wrote:
         | What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the
         | future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually
         | asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document
         | with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off
         | and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was
         | correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It
         | famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though
         | that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just
         | through hardcoding).
        
           | RBerenguel wrote:
           | Or you have asked correctly (or not, that's hard to tell from
           | the onset) and has given you a non-factual answer. For
           | example, I asked ChatGPT for what would be the best
           | introductory book for a subject (added some more conditions
           | to make it pretty clear-cut). It recommended me a book that
           | sounded reasonable in title, with existing authors in the
           | field... but the book didn't exist, at all.
        
             | boredemployee wrote:
             | Yes. It can even give name of research papers that never
             | existed
        
           | dpkirchner wrote:
           | I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it
           | returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the
           | response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are
           | also low scoring.
        
             | geoffreypoirier wrote:
             | I had a long requirements chat last night and did just
             | that:
             | 
             | There are many self-hosted solutions that could potentially
             | meet the requirements you have listed for your RSS
             | aggregator and reader project. Here is a list of some
             | popular options, ranked in order of their approximate
             | percentage of compatibility with the features you have
             | specified:
             | 
             | RSS Aggregator
             | 
             | | Percentage Score | URL |
             | 
             | | --- | --- |
             | 
             | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ |
             | 
             | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ |
             | 
             | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ |
             | 
             | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters |
             | 
             | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds |
             | 
             | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews |
             | 
             | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ |
             | 
             | RSS Reader
             | 
             | | Percentage Score | URL |
             | 
             | | --- | --- |
             | 
             | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ |
             | 
             | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ |
             | 
             | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ |
             | 
             | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters |
             | 
             | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds |
             | 
             | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews |
             | 
             | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ |
             | 
             | Please note that these percentages are approximate and are
             | intended only as a rough guide. You may want to consider
             | other factors such as the user interface, performance,
             | security, and integration with other tools when choosing a
             | solution for your project.
        
             | permo-w wrote:
             | you could probably ask it
        
               | dpkirchner wrote:
               | I'd considered that -- in some cases it says it's
               | absolutely confident, like with basic arithmetic, and in
               | others it says:
               | 
               | > Without more information, I cannot estimate the
               | accuracy or reliability of these claims. It is important
               | to note that there may be conflicting or inaccurate
               | information available online, and it is always a good
               | idea to verify information from multiple sources before
               | accepting it as fact.
               | 
               | which seems pretty reasonable.
        
           | krisoft wrote:
           | > It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on
           | 
           | Oh it tried to convince me that four is not larger than one.
           | :) It went like this:
           | 
           | At first I asked ChatGPT to summarise J.C. Owen's
           | contribution to geometric constraint solving. It gave me an
           | answer which might be even correct. It sounded correct
           | anyway. Then I have asked for a worked example of his method
           | used on a toy geometric constraint system. It run into
           | problems with that. Chiefly that the system is selected was
           | under constrained.
           | 
           | When I asked about that it insisted that it is well
           | constrained. It even volunteared the info that for a system
           | to be well constrained it needs as many variables as
           | constraint equations. Then it told me that the system it
           | generated has 4 variables and 1 equation.
           | 
           | As a last question I asked if "Is four larger than 1?" and it
           | resolved the seeming contradiction by telling me that in the
           | context of geometric constraint solving four is not larger
           | than one. One does learn a new thing every day. :)
        
         | anothernewdude wrote:
         | I'll take the links many times over a generated document.
         | 
         | I can't buy from a storefront generated by ChatGPT. I can't
         | cite a document written by ChatGPT, I can't trust news
         | generated by ChatGPT, I can't comment on a forum generated by
         | ChatGPT, I can't watch videos that ChatGPT describes, the
         | recipes ChatGPT creates may not be possible to cook, and will
         | probably still contain a fake life story before it.
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | Yeah, it is so obviously a usefull user interface pattern. The
         | real question is if it can be made accurate.
         | 
         | I have asked chatGPT about my boss (a well published
         | researcher) and it managed to summarise his work quite well,
         | name the field he has worked in and even write about some of
         | his previous projects. It also insisted on that he is already
         | dead. Which made it very funny when I have shown it to him. :)
         | 
         | But funny doesn't win one a trophy in information retrieval.
         | Clearly it knows a lot about a lot of things, but the accuracy
         | is hit and miss. Can this be fixed? Then this is the future. If
         | it can't, because this is a fundamental property of these
         | systems then it won't be a usefull replacement of search.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-25 23:00 UTC)