5
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
5 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43822 readers
871 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm with you on this one. Personally, there are a myriad of issues with replacing search engines with AI-generated answers:
When I look something up that isn't trivial, I typically use multiple search results and make the call myself. This step is removed if you use AI, unless one explicitly ask it to iterate all the top conflicting answers (along with sources) so the user can decide for themselves. However, as far as I know, its amalgamated answer is being treated as a source of truth, even if the content has nuanced conflicts a human can easily spot. This alone deters me from AI search in general.
I feel like doing this will degenerate my reading/skimming comprehension and research skills, and can lead to blindly trusting direct and easy to access answers.
In the context of technical searches like programming or whatnot, I'm not that pressed for time to take shortcuts. I don't mind working stuff out from online forums and documentation, purely because I enjoy it and it's part of the process.
Sometimes, looking things up yourself means you also can discover great blogs and personal wikis from niche communities, and related content that you can save and look back later.
Centralizing information makes the internet bland, boring and potentially exploitative. If it becomes normalized to pay a visit to one or two Big AI search engines instead of actually clicking on human-made sources then the information-providing part of the internet will become lost to time.
There's also problems with biases, alignment, training AI on AI-generated content, etc., make of that what you will but that sounds worse than spending a couple of minutes selecting sources for yourself. Top results are already full of generic, AI generated stuff. The internet, made by us, for us, must prevail.
Anecdotally, I've used ChatGPT once or twice when I was really pressed for time with something I couldn't find anywhere, and because my university professor wasn't replying to my email regarding the topic. I was somewhat impressed at its performance, but this was after 6 or 7 prompts, not a single search away.
Maybe the next generation of AI search users who's never looked a thing up manually will grimace at the thought of pre-AI search engines.