Ask Lemmy

Yes, but search engines will serve you LLM generated slop instead of search results, and sites like Stack Overflow will die due to lack of visitors, so the internet will become a reddit-like useless LLM ridden hellscape completely devoid of any human users, and we'll have to go back to our grandparents' old dusty paper encyclopedias.

Eventually, in a decade or two, once the bubble has burst and google, meta, and all those bastards have starved each other to death, we might be able to start rebuilding a new internet, probably reinventing usenet over ad-hoc decentralised wifi networks, but we won't get far, we'll die in the global warming wars before we get it to any significant size.

At least some bastards will have made billions out of the scam, though, so there's that, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

Fair enough, and that’s actually really good. You’re going to be one of the few who actually go through the trouble of making an account on a forum, ask a single question, and never visit the place after getting the answer. People like you are the reason why the internet has an answer to just about anything.

And if LLM don't have the actual answer they blabbering like a redditor, and if someone can't get an accurate answer they start asking forum and socmed.

LLM's are completely incapable of giving a correct answer, except by random chance.

They're extremely good at giving what looks like a correct answer, and convincing their users that it's correct, though.

When LLMs are the only option, people won't go elsewhere to look for answers, regardless of how nonsensical or incorrect they are, because the answers will look correct, and we'll have no way of checking them for correctness.

People will get hurt, of course. And die. (But we won't hear about it, because the LLM's won't talk about it.) And civilization will enter a truly dark age of mindless ignorance.

But that doesn't matter, because the company will have already got their money, and the line will go up.

The problem is that the LLMs have stolen all that information, repackaged it in ways that are subtly (or blatantly) false or misleading, and then hidden the real information behind a wall of search results that are entire domains of ai trash. It's very difficult to even locate the original sources or forums anymore.

To be fair, at the current state search engines work LLMs might not be the worst idea.

I'm looking for the 7800x3d, not 3D shooters, not the 1234x3d, no not the pentium 4, not the 4700rtx. It takes more and more effort to search something, and the first pages show every piece of crap I'm not interested in.

What I'm worried about are traditional indexers being intentionally nerfed, discontinued, or left unmaintained at best. I've often wondered what it would take to self host a personal indexer. I remember a time when search giant Alta Vista had a full text index of the then known internet on their DEC Alpha server(s).

I think you will be in a loud minority, people don't like additional work.

You know how the steel from prenuclear proliferation is prized? I wonder if that's going to happen with data from before 2022 as well now. Lol.

Sound similar to betteridges law of headlines.
Im sure there are tricks like adding 'fact check your response' but I suspect there is something intrinsic to these models that makes it a super difficult problem.

I get the feeling that LLMs are designed to please humans, so uncomfortable answers like “I don’t know” are out of the question.

• This thing is broken. How do I fix it?
• Don’t know. 🤷
• Seriously? I need an answer? Any ideas?
• Nope. You’re screwed. Best of luck to you. Figure it out. I believe in you. ❤️

LLMs are awesome in their knowledge until you start to hear its answers to stuff you already know and makes you wonder if anything was correct.

This applies equally well to human-generated answers to stuff.

True, but soon the sources will be AI generated too, in a big GIGO loop.

Trouble is that 'quick answers' mean the LLM took no time to do a thorough search.

LLMs don't "search". They essentially provide weighted parrot-answers based on what they've seen elsewhere.

If you tell an LLM that the sky is red, they will tell you the sky is red. If you tell them your eyes are the colour of the sky, they will repeat that your eyes are red. LLMs aren't capable of checking if something is true.

Theyre just really fast parrots with a big vocabulary. And every time they squawk, it burns a tree.

If you cut a forum's population by 90% it will die.

This is one of the biggest problems with AI. If it becomes the easiest way to get good answers for most things, it will starve the channels that can answer the things it can't (including everything new).