this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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The problem is that the sales pitch of these AI answering services in search engines is to save you time from having to open search results and read them yourself. The problem with 80-90% accuracy is that if the summaries are hallucinated even once, you can no longer trust them implicitly, so in all cases you now have to verify what it says by opening search results and reading them yourself. It’s a convenience feature that doesn’t offer you any actual convenience.
Sure it’s impressive that they are accurate 80-90% of their time, but AI used in this context is of no actual value.
It's a real issue. A strong use case for LLM search engines is providing summaries which combine lots of facts that would take some time to compile through searching the old fashioned way. But if it's only 90% accurate and 10% hallucinated bullshit, it becomes very difficult to pick out the bullshit from the truth.
The other day I asked Copilot to provide an overview of a particular industrial sector in my area. It produced something that was 90% concise, accurate, readable and informative briefing, and 10% complete nonsense. It hallucinated an industrial estate that didn't exist, a whole government programme that doesn't exist, it talked about a scheme that went defunct 20 years ago as if it were still current, etc. If it weren't for the fact that I was already very familiar with the subject, I might not have caught it. Anyone actually relying on that for useful work is in serious danger of making a complete tit of themselves.
Copilot sucks and I totally understand the POV. I stick with GPT, Mixtral. I don't think their going anywhere anytime soon but they need significant actual refinement.
@EncryptKeeper @OhVenus_Baby I have very much embraced the swearing method to get rid of 50% of my Google result screen being taken up by an untrustworthy statement. Just a waste of space and scrolling time.