Comment by Forgeties79
2 days ago
> You can't blame an LLM for getting the facts wrong, or hallucinating, when by design they don't even attempt to store facts in the first place
On one level I agree, but I do feel it’s also right to blame the LLM/company for that when the goal is to replace my search engine of choice (my major tool for finding facts and answering general questions), which is a huge pillar of how they’re sold to/used by the public.
True, although that's a tough call for a company like Google.
Even before LLMs people were asking Google search questions rather than looking for keyword matches, and now coupled with ChatGPT it's not surprising that people are asking the computer to answer questions and seeing this as a replacement for search. I've got to wonder how the typical non-techie user internalizes the difference between asking questions of Google (non-AI mode) and asking ChatGPT?
Clearly people asking ChatGPT instead of Google could rapidly eat Google's lunch, so we're now getting "AI overview" alongside search results as an attempt to mitigate this.
I think the more fundamental problem is not just the blurring of search vs "AI", but these companies pushing "AI" (LLMs) as some kind of super-human intelligence (leading to uses assuming it's logical and infallible), rather than more honestly presenting it as what it is.
Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you’ve got here
> Even before LLMs people were asking Google search questions rather than looking for keyword matches
Google gets some of the blame for this by way of how useless Google search became for doing keyword searches over the years. Keyword searches have been terrible for many years, even if you use all the old tricks like quotations and specific operators.
Even if the reason for this is because non-tech people were already trying to use Google in the way that it thinks it optimized for, I'd argue they could have done a better job keeping things working well with keyword searches by training the user with better UI/UX.
(Though at the end of the day, I subscribe to the theory that Google let search get bad for everyone on purpose because once you have monopoly status you show more ads by having a not-great but better-than-nothing search engine than a great one).