this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

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[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 213 points 2 years ago (8 children)

The part about Google isn't wrong.

But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 74 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I'd say they at least give more immediately useful info. I've got to scroll past 5-8 sponsored results and then the next top results are AI generated garbage anyways.

Even though I think he's mostly right, the AI techbro gameplan is obvious. Position yourself as a better alternative to Google search, burn money by the barrelful to capture the market, then begin enshitification.

In fact, enshitification has already begun; responses are comparatively expensive to generate. The more users they onboard, the more they have to scale back the quality of those responses.

[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago

ChatGPT is already getting worse at code commenting and programming.

The problem is that enshitification is basically a requirement in a capitalist economy.

[–] ribboo@lemm.ee 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean most top searches are AI generated bullshit nowadays anyway. Adding Reddit to a search is basically the only decent way to get a proper answer. But those answers are not much more reliable than ChatGPT. You have to use the same sort of skepticism and fact checking regardless.

Google has really gotten horrible over the years.

[–] SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 4 points 2 years ago

Most of the results after the first page on Google are usually the same as the usable results, just mirrored on some shady site full of ads and malware.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I already go to ChatGPT more than Google. If you pay for it then the latest version can access the internet and if it doesn’t know the answer to something it’ll search the internet for you. Sometimes I come across a large clickbait page and I just give ChatGPT the link and tell it to get the information from it for me.

[–] madnificent@lemmy.world 40 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Do you fact-check the answers?

It depends what you’re using it for as to whether you need to fact check stuff.

I’m a software developer and if I can’t remember how to do an inner join in SQL then I can easier ask ChatGPT to do it for me and I will know if it is right or not as this is my field of expertise.

If I’m asking it how to perform open heart surgery on my cat, then sure I’m probably going to want several second opinions as that is not my area of expertise.

When using a calculator do you use two different calculators to check that the first one isn’t lying?

Also, you made a massive assumption that the stuff OP was using it for was something that warranted fact checking.

I can see why you would use it. Why would I want to search Google for inner joins sql when it is going to give me so many false links that don’t give me the info in need in a concise manner.

Even time wasting searches have just been ruined. Example: Top Minecraft Java seeds 1.20. Will give me pages littered with ads or the awful page 1-10 that you must click through.

Many websites are literally unusable at this point and I use ad blockers and things like consent-o-matic. But there are still pop up ads, sub to our newsletter, scam ads etc. so much so that I’ll just leave the site and forego learning the new thing I wanted to learn.

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

The new release of GPT-4 searches Bing, reads the results, summarizes, and provides sources, so it's easier to fact check than ever if you need to.

[–] Baines@lemmy.world 21 points 2 years ago

give it time, algos will fuck those results as well

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 10 points 2 years ago

ChatGPT powers Bing Chat, which can access the internet and find answers for you, no purchase necessary (if you're not on edge, you might need to install a browser extension to access it as they are trying to push edge still).

[–] madnificent@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Do you fact-check the answers?

[–] Redredme@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

That's such a strange question. It's almost like you imply that Google results do not need fact checking.

They do. Everything found online does.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

With google, it depends on what webpage you end up on. Some require more checking than others, which are more trustworthy

Generative AI can hallucinate about anything

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There are no countries in Africa starting with K.

LLMs aren’t trained to give correct answers, they’re trained to generate human-like text. That’s a significant difference.

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They also aren't valuable for asking direct questions like this.

There value comes in with call and response discussions. Being able to pair program and work through a problem for example. It isn't about it spitting out a working problem, but about it being able to assess a piece of information in a different way than you can, which creates a new analysis of the information.

It's extraordinarily good at finding things you miss in text.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah. There's definitely tasks suited to LLMs. I've used it to condense text, write emails, and even project planning because they do give decently good ideas if you prompt them right.

Not sure I'd use them for finding information though, even with the ability to search for it. I'd much rather just search for it myself so I can select the sources, then have the LLM process it.

[–] madnificent@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Agree.

I found it more tempting to accept the initial answers I got from GPT4 (and derivatives) because they are so well written. I know there are more like me.

With the advent of working LLMs, reference manuals should gain importance too. I check them more often than before because LLMs have forced me to. Could be very positive.

[–] yoz@aussie.zone 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Its already happening at my work. Many are using bing AI instead of google.

[–] DudeDudenson 3 points 2 years ago

Don't worry they'll start monetizing LLMs and injecting ads into them soon enough and we'll be back to square one

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

I suspect that client-side AI might actually be the kind of thing that filters the crap from search results and actually gets you what you want.

That would only be Chat-AI if it turns out natural language queries are better to determine the kind of thing the user is looking for than people trying to craft more traditional query strings.

I'm thinking each person would can train their AI based on which query results they went for in unfiltered queries, with some kind of user provided feedback of suitability to account for click-bait (i.e. somebody selecting a result because it looks good but it turns out its not).

[–] Zeth0s@lemmy.world -2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If you aren't paying for chatgpt, give a look to perplexity.ai, it is free.

You'll see that sources are references and linked

Don't judge on the free version of chatgpt

Edit. Why the hell are you guys downvoting a legit suggestion of a new technology in the technology community? What do you expect to find here? Comments on steam engines?