• @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Ugh. Don’t get me started.

    Most people don’t understand that the only thing it does is ‘put words together that usually go together’. It doesn’t know if something is right or wrong, just if it ‘sounds right’.

    Now, if you throw in enough data, it’ll kinda sorta make sense with what it writes. But as soon as you try to verify the things it writes, it falls apart.

    I once asked it to write a small article with a bit of history about my city and five interesting things to visit. In the history bit, it confused two people with similar names who lived 200 years apart. In the ‘things to visit’, it listed two museums by name that are hundreds of miles away. It invented another museum that does not exist. It also happily tells you to visit our Olympic stadium. While we do have a stadium, I can assure you we never hosted the Olympics. I’d remember that, as i’m older than said stadium.

    The scary bit is: what it wrote was lovely. If you read it, you’d want to visit for sure. You’d have no clue that it was wholly wrong, because it sounds so confident.

    AI has its uses. I’ve used it to rewrite a text that I already had and it does fine with tasks like that. Because you give it the correct info to work with.

    Use the tool appropriately and it’s handy. Use it inappropriately and it’s a fucking menace to society.

    • @zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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      1110 hours ago

      I’ve had people tell me “Of course, I’ll verify the info if it’s important”, which implies that if the question isn’t important, they’ll just accept whatever ChatGPT gives them. They don’t care whether the answer is correct or not; they just want an answer.

      • @IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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        28 hours ago

        That is a valid tactic for programming or how-to questions, provided you know not to unthinkingly drink bleach if it says to.

  • Victoria
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    13920 hours ago

    Meanwhile Google search results:

    • AI summary
    • 2x “sponsored” result
    • AI copy of Stackoverflow
    • AI copy of Geeks4Geeks
    • Geeks4Geeks (with AI article)
    • the thing you actually searched for
    • AI copy of AI copy of stackoverflow
    • @rescue_toaster@lemm.ee
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      6920 hours ago

      Should we put bets on how long until chatgpt responds to anything with:

      Great question, before i give you a response, let me show you this great video for a new product you’ll definitely want to check out!

    • @FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org
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      2920 hours ago

      Google search is literally fucking dogshit and the worst it has EVER been. I’m starting to think fucking duckduckgo (relies on Bing) gives better results at this point.

      • Aielman15
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        2419 hours ago

        I have been using Duck for a few years now and I honestly prefer it to Google at this point. I’ll sometimes switch to Google if I don’t find anything on Duck, but that happens once every three or four months, if that.

            • @TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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              113 hours ago

              To this day any time I navigate somewhere with Google maps while someone else separately navigates there with apple maps, we end up at different places. More often than not, I’m where we both should’ve ended up.

              • @radiohead37@lemmynsfw.com
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                112 hours ago

                Interesting. In my experience, google maps is “too creative” on their routes. They usually send me to some back roads that only make my drive much longer.

                • @Soggy@lemmy.world
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                  27 hours ago

                  I suspect that Google Maps preemptively routes some percentage of drivers through alternate directions in order to ease congestion. (Because if Maps tells you that the obvious route will get you there in thirty minutes and it takes an hour then you’re going to be mad at Maps)

                  Regardless of their route choices, Maps is always solid with ETA for me and it has access to a ton of traffic data.

        • @DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca
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          217 hours ago

          The one thing Google still has over Duck for me at this point is reddit results. So much niche information is stored on that site, but they’ve blocked anyone other than Google from crawling the site so other engines can’t index past the point they changed that policy.

        • teft
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          319 hours ago

          Same here. I only switch to google to search for images for memes. For some reason bing has a harder time finding random star trek scenes.

        • BarqsHasBite
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          118 hours ago

          I use ddg but find Google gives better results and Google’s snippet feature still rocks.

          • @TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            112 hours ago

            Careful. People here get mad about that for some reason. Like you can’t think Google sucks but that their search engine is still better than others. And people will argue with you that Google is way worse than anything else. I don’t know what planet they are from.

      • GingaNinga
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        1019 hours ago

        I’m in sciences and the AI overview gives wrong answers ALL THE TIME. If students or god forbid professionals rely on it thats bad news.

        • snooggums
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          619 hours ago

          Isn’t it funny that a lot of people were worried that wikipedia would be unreliable because anyone could edit it, then turned out pretty reliable, but AI is being pushed hard despite being even more unreliable than the worst speculation about wikipedia?

          Being for profit excuses being shitty I guess.

    • sp3ctr4l
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      18 hours ago

      We have new feature, use it!

      No, its broken and stupid, I prefer old feature.

      … Fine!

      breaks old feature even harder

    • @PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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      516 hours ago

      I’ve used Google since 2004. I stopped using it this year because as the parent comment points out, it’s all marketing and AI. I like Qwant but it’s not perfect but it functions like a previous version of Google.

      • @TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        213 hours ago

        I have tried a few replacements for Google but I’ve yet to find anything remotely as effective for searches about things close to me. Like if I’m looking for a restaurant near me, kagi, startpage, and DDG are not good. Is qwant good for a use case like that? Haven’t heard about it before.

        • @PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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          29 hours ago

          I’ve had some success but it goes off of your ISPs server location so for me it’s not very useful.

      • @DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee
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        214 hours ago

        I have not enjoyed Qwant - tried it as my default but I’m back to DDG. I just want a functional Google again (boolean operators please…)

    • NielsBohron
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      518 hours ago

      yeah, but at least we can vet that shit better that the unsourced and hallucinated drivel provided by ChatGPT

    • @brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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      119 hours ago

      The irony is that Gemini Pro is actually better than ChatGPT (which is not saying a ton, as OpenAI have completely stagnated and even some small open models are better now), but whatever they use for search is beyond horrible.

      • @dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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        16 hours ago

        The infinitive is the form of a verb that in English is said “to [x]”

        For example, “to run” is the infinitive form of “run.”

        OP probably meant “infinitely” worse.

    • GHiLA
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      517 hours ago

      “Did you ChatGPT it?”

      I wondered what language this would be an unintended insult in.

      Then I chuckled when I ironically realized, it’s offensive in English, lmao.

  • @ch00f@lemmy.world
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    1816 hours ago

    Last night, we tried to use chatGPT to identify a book that my wife remembers from her childhood.

    It didn’t find the book, but instead gave us a title for a theoretical book that could be written that would match her description.

    • @dis_honestfamiliar
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      716 hours ago

      At least it said if it exists, instead of telling you when it was written (hallucinating)

    • @leverage@lemdro.id
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      215 hours ago

      Same happens every time I’ve tried to use it for search. Will be radioactive for this type of thing until someone figures that out. Quite frustrating, if they spent as much time on determining the difference between when a user wants objective information with citations as they do determining if the response breaks content guidelines, we might actually have something useful. Instead, we get AI slop.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      1014 hours ago

      I’m somewhat surprised that ChatGPT has never replied with “just Google it, bruh!” considering how often that answer appears in its data set.

      • @ddplf@szmer.info
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        412 hours ago

        Which is still better than “elementary truths that will quickly turn into shit I make up without warning”, which is where ChatGPT is and will forever be stuck at.

  • AnimalsDream
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    1217 hours ago

    I say, “Just search it.” Not interested in being free advertising for Google.

  • @Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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    2319 hours ago

    GPTs natural language processing is extremely helpful for simple questions that have historically been difficult to Google because they aren’t a concise concept.

    The type of thing that is easy to ask but hard to create a search query for like tip of my tongue questions.

    • @AstralPath@lemmy.ca
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      2819 hours ago

      Google used to be amazing at this. You could literally search “who dat guy dat paint dem melty clocks” and get the right answer immediately.

      • burgersc12
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        216 hours ago

        I mean tbf you can still search “who DAT guy” and it will give you Salvador Dali in one of those boxes that show up before the search results.

    • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      618 hours ago

      Google intentionally made search worse, but even if they want to make it better again, there’s very little they can do. The web itself is extremely low signal:noise, and it’s almost impossible to write an algorithm that lets the signal shine through (while also giving any search results back)

  • @Creddit@lemmy.world
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    617 hours ago

    This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

    I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

    I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

    When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

    When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

    Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.