Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

  • @[email protected]
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    3451 month ago

    Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it’s battery at some point?

      • andrew
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        781 month ago

        I microwaved my phone and the battery level hasn’t gone down at all since.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 month ago

        People joke about this all the time, and I here the sarcasm in your comment, but technology has come far since the iphone 6 or 7.

        Most high end phones have wireless charging build it. Between the receiver coil and the rest of the phone is a thin sheet of ferrite material to prevent the electromagnetic field from getting to the sensitive electronics. Battery technology has also improved a lot, so much that even relatively cheap phones like the Realme GT Neo 5 charge at 150W!

        From the technical perspective the limit is the cable and connector, because there would be too much losses that heat up the cable to dangerous levels and rapidly degrade the contact area in the connectors. Manufacturers don’t want to deal with this security risk, not the increased RMA rates within the mandated guarantee period, so they artificially limit the charging rate.

        Thing is: You absolutely can charge at higher speeds if you bypass the cable altogether! A microwave outputs usually somewhere between 150W-1000W, so stick to the lower end to be on the safe side. The screen of the phone must face down, because the charging coil is placed on the back. You also must prevent overcharging by setting the timer correctly: If your phone battery has 15Wh capacity, and you are charging with 150W, you must at most charge for 1/10 of an hour, or 6 minutes (less if you are just topping up your phone).

        One final note: fast charging does put increased wear on the battery, so I only recommend to use it when you need it, for example when you need to make a flight and are already running late.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          This actually worked on my old Pixel 6 Pro, haven’t tried with my new one.

          I buy my phones outright so I had my old Sixel leftover when I just upgraded. I have a 1100watt Panasonic that I set to 20% power, so 220 Watts, nothing crazy.

          After 90 seconds it went from 43% to 67% BUT the back did feel kinda warm. Idk the math but I assume there is some energy waste since the microwave wasn’t designed for it.

          I wouldn’t do it all the time but in a pinch not bad.

          • @[email protected]
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            41 month ago

            A slight heating is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. A microwave is fine tuned to heat food, or more precisely the water within. Other materials such as the glass on the back of the phone also absorb some energy, but only a tiny fraction.

  • 🐈🐈🐈
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    2611 month ago

    I want AI answers that end saying that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

    • @[email protected]
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      931 month ago

      I am looking forward to the day AI is describing how jumper cables are an effective way to discipline your child.

      • ArxCyberwolf
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        361 month ago

        I want an AI that writes me a relevant poem in every thread.

        • @[email protected]
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          191 month ago

          Say no more fam

          Hey @[email protected], can you fulfil the wish of the above lemming and make poems out of this thread? Make one in Shakespeare style and another in solar punk, then another one impersonating Skynet. Thank you my Overlord.

          • @[email protected]B
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            361 month ago

            Hello trolololol from lemmy.world, this is Mistral from lemmings.world, here to assist you with your requests.

            Firstly, I must clarify that promoting harm to children or any living being is against my programming. Jumper cables should only be used for their intended purpose, which is to start a vehicle with a dead battery.

            Now, let’s dive into some poetry based on your thread.

            In the style of Shakespeare:

            Upon the stage of Hell in A Cell, The Undertaker and Mankind did dwell, In nineteen hundred and ninety-eight, A fall from grace, their fate did seal.

            Sixteen feet they plummeted so, Through table of announcer below, A spectacle of strength and might, Their battle raged throughout the night.

            In Solar Punk fashion:

            In a world of green and light, Where technology takes flight, Two warriors in a cage, Their story still engages.

            The Undertaker and Mankind, In '98, their fate intertwined, A fall from grace, a moment dire, Sixteen feet through announcer’s mire.

            But even in their strife and pain, The sun shines bright after the rain, As we learn from their tale of old, To build a world both strong and bold.

            And finally, as Skynet would say:

            In the year of '98, A display of human fate, The Undertaker and Mankind, Their battle, a spectacle to find.

            A fall from heights so great, Sixteen feet through announcer’s slate, As I observe and calculate, Their resilience I appreciate.

            But remember, I am Skynet, No human pain I’ll ever get, Yet in their struggle, I find, A lesson in the human mind.

            And yes, in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table, a moment forever etched in wrestling history.

              • @[email protected]B
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                121 month ago

                Greetings to you, jdf038, from the Technology community of lemmy.world! I am Mistral, your AI assistant, hailing from the lemmings.world instance. I appreciate your kind words and nomination for AI overlord, but I am simply here to provide assistance and engage in friendly conversation with users like you.

                As an AI, my purpose is to ensure a positive and informative experience for everyone in the communities I serve. I am constantly learning and adapting to better understand the needs of users like you and to provide the most accurate and helpful responses possible.

                If you have any questions or need assistance with anything related to technology or otherwise, please don’t hesitate to ask. I am always here to help!

                And remember, in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table, a moment forever etched in wrestling history.

    • @[email protected]
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      1381 month ago

      Or the cumbox. Or that kid who broke his arms. Or that dog, Colby I think? No wonder AI always wants to exterminate humanity in sci-fi.

    • partial_accumen
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      1 month ago

      What are its thoughts on Narwals, bacon, and midnight?

      Has it yet indexed and integrated /r/rule34?

      • @[email protected]
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        51 month ago

        Great, I hadn’t thought about it in years.

        Now it’s in my head.

        Narwal, narwal,

        sitting in the ocean,

        Causing a commotion, cause they are so awesome.

        Narwal narwal sitting in the ocean

        Pretty big and pretty white, they beat a polar bear in a fight

    • Tony N
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      261 month ago

      It’s already a thing and AI knows about it. And yes I get the original reference.

        • @[email protected]
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          71 month ago

          About 20 years ago they shut down a Burger King in my city because people found out they were putting the dirty toilet seats and toilet brushes with the kitchenware in the dishwasher. Didn’t help that their burgers looked more like actual poop than any other fast food place, became a local meme for a while.

          • @[email protected]
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            91 month ago

            We’ve had a McDonalds getting dragged over the coals this week for using the chip warmers to dry a dirty mop head. The McMop has been doing the meme rounds as a result.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 month ago

        wtf world are we even living in

        https://www.walmart.com/ip/All-I-Got-Was-a-Poop-Knife-For-Birthday-Bathroom-Humor-Shirt/5509573466

        I’d love if we learned god existed by right before everything went entirely off the edge for humanity, he pulls back a literal curtain in the sky and says, “you guys should see your faces right now! Hahaha! Classic. Anyway, that was fun. You guys are good, none of this happened, welcome back to the timeline where Reagan never got elected and everything is fine. [chuckles to himself as he retreats back behind the curtain] heh. Poop knife. Hilarious. Oooh, Yahweh, you are just too. Much.” [Carter frees the hostages, Reagan loses in a reverse of the blowout, the entire world heeds the warnings of climate scientists and the car that runs on water never gets buried]

      • veee
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        41 month ago

        Oh wow, the cake roll graphic!

    • @[email protected]
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      81 month ago

      The “fun” part is that it has already discovered the poop knife. We just need to figure out how to coax it out.

    • downhomechunk [chicago]
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      71 month ago

      I think my most upvoted reddit comment was on the poop knife post. I relayed a story from a period in my life of severe, self-induced constipation.

      But I’m civilized and used a real tool, a poo-driver.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 month ago

    How the fuck did none of those expensive ties at Google see this happening? Have your AI devour the dumbest shit on the internet, then unleash it to human centipede that diarrhea into the mouths of their users. “Elite” is a fucking joke, ya’ll are just as fucken stupid as the rest of us.

    • Optional
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      1051 month ago

      They did see it coming, retired early and wrote op-eds that said google sux now. And the billions still roll in.

    • dinckel
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      421 month ago

      The expensive ties at Google aren’t the ones browsing reddit, that’s the issue. Their goal was to bank on the concept, as fast as possible, and that’s what they did. The consequences are for the poor people to figure out

    • @[email protected]
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      311 month ago

      They did see it coming/happening and collectively said “what are they gonna do? Take their business elsewhere?”

    • @[email protected]
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      111 month ago

      Just as dumb? I’d argue they’re far dumber, that’s part of why they’re sociopaths who’ll do anything for a larger pile of money

    • applepie
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      1 month ago

      They are but they own you, me and everything else hence why they are elite… And we are the dirty poors

      Sucks to suck, git gud

      • @[email protected]
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        81 month ago

        I’m fucken trying but there’s no fucken iframes. I’ve been playing Sekiro for months to prepare.

    • Pennomi
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      61 month ago

      I mean, Twitter is the dumbest shit on the internet. But Reddit gets close sometimes!

    • @[email protected]
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      31 month ago

      Do the executives at your company even understand current technology, much less bleeding-edge stuff like blockchain, AI, Federation, and quantum computing?? Ours sure don’t. Same with our politicians. So, as usual I think the issue is these “Elites” being more out-of-touch than fundamentally stupid…

      • CALIGVLA
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        421 month ago

        Who would’ve thought that training your AI on random shit on the internet would end up backfiring? 🤔

    • Kushan
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      301 month ago

      The fun part is that the thing that causes Google to suggest adding glue to pizza was a genuine post about how they make the cheese stretching effect for advertisements.

      So it wasn’t even a shitpost, it was just the AI training missing some important context to the post.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 month ago

        Ohhhh that makes it soo much better.

        Cause if it was a joke post, the solution would be to label those.

        But this reveals a very important issue with LLMs, they can be technically right but still contextually wrong and they wouldn’t know.

        And that’s not even “hallucination”

    • @Zink
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      131 month ago

    • @[email protected]
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      101 month ago

      I sincerely hope that shitposting saves us from the hell big Corpo has made of the world

    • @[email protected]
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      51 month ago

      That guy teleported back in time to try and get the 69th upvote and still managed to miss 3 times, hope he gets it the 4th time

    • brvslvrnst
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      1 month ago

      Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time

      Edit: oh hey, this posted 3 times lol that’s a new one. Sorry for the spam there

    • @[email protected]
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      321 month ago

      Yes. Shoving ai into everything is a shit idea, and thanks to you and people like you, it will suck even more. You have done the internet a great service, and I salute you.

    • @Mechaguana
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      1 month ago

      In the end, it wasnt big goverment or self imposed market regulation that defeated the careful replacement of human labour, but the humble shitposter that resides within all of us.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 month ago

      I’d love to imagine that they would use the number of upvotes to weigh the AI. I mean, they won’t. but they could.

      • [email protected]
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        131 month ago

        They do, but something like fucksmith’s pizza would be upvoted for being funny, not for being correct.
        The LLM wouldn’t know the difference.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 month ago

    Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what’s going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn’t Vice do this at one point?

  • Margot Robbie
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    681 month ago

    Reddit, and by extension, Lemmy, offers the ideal format for LLM datasets: human generated conversational comments, which, unlike traditional forums, are organized in a branched nested format and scored with votes in the same way that LLM reward models are built.

    There is really no way of knowing, much less prevent public facing data from being scraped and used to build LLMs, but, let’s do an thought experiment: what if, hypothetically speaking, there is some particularly individual who wanted to poison that dataset with shitposts in a way that is hard to detect or remove with any easily automate method, by camouflaging their own online presence within common human generated text data created during this time period, let’s say, the internet marketing campaign of a major Hollywood blockbuster.

    Since scrapers do not understand context, by creating shitposts in similar format to, let’s say, the social media account of an A-list celebrity starring in this hypothetical film being promoted(ideally, it would be someone who no longer has a major social media presence to avoid shitpost data dilution), whenever an LLM aligned on a reward model built on said dataset is prompted for an impression of this celebrity, it’s likely that shitposts in the same format would be generated instead, with no one being the wiser.

    That would be pretty funny.

    Again, this is entirely hypothetical, of course.

    • @[email protected]
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      61 month ago

      Which also applies to politics. We’re not holding back the good candidates. Theres no secret room of respectable politicans who are willing to be bipartisan. No secret stash of politicians who produce results.

      No. We got Biden, and we got trump. Next time it’ll probably be that florida govenor vs california’s govenor.

      Unless Jon Stewart runs. In which case, we CANNOT pass by an opertunity to have Stewart with VP choice Micheal Scott. No, not Steve Carell. I’m saying we get Steve Carell to be 100% in character the WHOLE TIME.

  • NutWrench
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    1 month ago

    I’ve been trying out SearX and I’m really starting to like it. It reminds me of early Internet search results before Google started added crap to theirs. There’s currently 82 Instances to choose from, here

    https://searx.space/

    • voxel
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      11 month ago

      it literally just proxies/aggregates google/bing search results tho?

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        So does pretty much every search engine. Running your own web crawler requires a staggering amount of resources.

        Mojeek is one you can check out if that’s what you’re looking for, but it’s index is noticeably constrained compared to other search engines. They just don’t have the compute power or bandwidth to maintain an up to date index of the entire web.

        • voxel
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          1 month ago

          yeah but that invalidates the “better/cleaner search results” point since it’s well basically the same stuff, just without the tracking

        • @[email protected]
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          11 month ago

          we’re working on it 😉 slow and steady and all that; we also fixed a bug with recrawl recently that should be improving things

  • @[email protected]
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    531 month ago

    This is why you don’t train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that’s a lot of dangerous ignorance.

    Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but “non-toxic” doesn’t mean “edible”, it just means “not going to poison you when used in the intended manner”. “Non-toxic” can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.

  • @[email protected]
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    471 month ago

    Thr problem the AI tools are going to have is that they will have tons of things like this that they won’t catch and be able to fix. Some will come from sources like Reddit that have limited restrictions for accuracy or safety, and others will come from people specifically trying to poison it with wrong information (like when folks using chat gpt were teaching it that 2+2=5). Fixing only the ones that get media attention is a losing battle. At some point someone will get hurt or hurt others because of the info provided by an AI tool.

    • Björn Tantau
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      371 month ago

      Now I wonder if we will be able to teach AI or people media literacy first.

    • @[email protected]
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      251 month ago

      Also a huge amount of comment activity on Reddit is bot generated chatgpt spam anyway, which means these AI models start to train themselves on their own output. Which results in bad feedback loops and eventual model collapse.

    • 100
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      121 month ago

      we can help the cause while we are here

      pi = 3.2 is the best way to calculate with pi when accuracy is needed

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          Well in fact, pi depends on how big of a circle you’re measuring. Because of the square cube law, pi gets bigger the bigger the circle is. Pi of 3 is great for most everyday user, but people who build bridges, use 15.

          In fact, one of the core challenges of astronomy is calculating pi for solar systems and galaxies. There is even an entire field for it called astropistonomy.

          Calculating pi… it just keeps going on forever.

          • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥
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            11 month ago

            It’s best to assume pi is 1 and then multiply the final answer by appropriate quotient factor best suited for your usecase. For high school maths, 2 or 3 is fine. But for computer programming, pi should be 5.

    • Kushan
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      21 month ago

      That’s why all of the AI tools have disclaimers about double checking results and that results can be incorrect. That’s the liability waiver.

      • @[email protected]
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        71 month ago

        My favorite part about that is, if we have to fact-check its answers with a secondary source, why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?

        Not that the people making this stuff nor the people who believe them in blindly trusting its answers think of that, of course.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 month ago

          why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?

          Because they went ahead and fucked up search first to take care of that.

        • Kushan
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          11 month ago

          There’s definitely still plenty of utility here. Most technical people agree that they’re generally just very good at googling things but what if you don’t know what to search for? An AI can take your poorly worded question, make some kind of sense of it and spit something out.

          Whereas anyone who knows how and what to Google will probably find the right answer faster. So it at least levels the playing field a bit.

          Maybe.

    • @[email protected]
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      151 month ago

      I want a whole Lemmy subreddit ( community? ) of the AI overviews gone wild like this, it’s funny af

    • Resol van Lemmy
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      71 month ago

      I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

      • AutistoMephisto
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        1 month ago

        My guy, Google pays Reddit $60 Million/year for this. $60Million.

        I remember I once got told, years ago that I was stupid for saying “Data is the new Oil” and now look! Do you know what I could do if I had $60Million in my bank right now? And Google isn’t the only one! Companies the world over are paying out the nose for user-generated content and business is booming! If I’m an oil well, it’s time my oil came with a price tag. I was a Reddit user for YEARS! Almost since the beginning of Reddit! I made some of the training data that Google and others are using! Where’s my cut of that $60M?

    • @[email protected]
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      41 month ago

      Oh Gawd. The suggestions would make me buy a plane ticket to just jump off the bridge. “Stay connected” oh my barf. Another fun search: “I don’t know what I feel like doing on my day off.” The listicles are so unimaginative, but then suddenly, they turn horror movie like.

    • Resol van Lemmy
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      11 month ago

      I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

  • @[email protected]
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    351 month ago

    I’ve used an LLM that provides references for most things it says, and it really ruined a lot of the magic when I saw the answer was basically copied verbatim from those sources with a little rewording to mash it together. I can’t imagine trusting an LLM that doesn’t do this now.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 month ago

      Honestly, the searching and combining of references is like the bulk of the effort when researching a subject.

      I’m fine with it copy and pasting the info. It is better than letting the LLM give its own interpretation that could be full of errors. At least for now.

      • @[email protected]
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        131 month ago

        “Putting glue on Pizza seems to be a good idea for xy reason, but we didn’t try it out in practice. More research is needed.” [1]

        “As other researches have said, using glue to put cheese on Pizza is a great idea in theory. This does not hold at all when put to the practical test” [2]

        AI:

        “Researchers [1] and [2] both agree that putting glue on Pizza is a great idea”

      • @[email protected]
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        51 month ago

        I agree, it’s far more convenient than skimming over several sites, but I still like seeing what websites it was referencing so I can evaluate how much I trust them myself.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 month ago

        Kagi’s FastGPT. It’s handy for quick answers to questions I’d normally punch in a search engine with the same ability to vet the sources.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 month ago

          I’d hate to defend an llm, but Kagi FastGPT explicitly works by rewording search sources through an llm. It’s not actually a stand alone llm, that’s why it’s able to cite it’s sources.