Stop using generative AI as a search engine

Ok.
uses search engine
search engine gives generative AI answer
God dammit
scroll down
click search result
AI Generated article
- search engine gives generative AI answer
  It cites it source, so can't be that bad right?
  click link to source
  It's an AI generated article
  Oh no.
  
  AI will give the correct, real source and then still make shit up. Bing linked to bulbapedia to tell me wailord was the heaviest Pokemon. Bulbapedia knows it isn't close, bingpt doesn't know shit.
- Use udm14.org.
  
  Legend.
- The uncertainty has gripped the world in fear. I go to hug my wife for comfort. She is ~~cake~~Gen AI.
  
  Jen AI
- Don’t be ridiculous. It’s more like Google search result you click is an ad rather than an organic search result, and that ad… is an ad that’s ai generated… god damnit
- Maybe go to more than 2 places for your information? I agree that this shit is also an issue with news and other media, but it's not that hard to find more substantial information on things. At least not yet.
  And I can't remember the exact process off hand, but there's still a way to get search results without that garbage on google. I'll edit if I can find it.
  *Found it. So, at least for Firefox, you can add a custom search engine through the settings. For the url, input https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 and then set it as your default se if you want. As far as I can tell, it's a simplified version of the main search, just without the "helpful" add-ons. Hope it helps some people.
  **For some reason Lemmy is adding a '25' between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn't be there, just fyi.
  
  **For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.
  The URL as shown is actually valid. No worries there.
  The value 25 happens to be hexidecimal for a percent sign. The percent symbol is reserved in URLs for encoding special characters (e.g. %20 is a space), so a bare percent sign must be represented by %25. Lemmy must be parsing your URL and normalizing it for the rest of us.
- Dont forget sponsored results crammed in between.
- Ok.
  uses search engine
  search engine gives generative AI answer
  stops using that search engine
  That's all you have to do, it's not hard. I'm absolutely certain that people really want to have things that annoy them and makes them feel bad just so they can complain and get attention from that complaining. This is the same as people complaining about ads online and then doing nothing to fix that, it's the same with many things.

The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.
- To be fair, humans were already diluting it in a great sea of excrement, the robots just came to take our job and do it even faster and better.
- Sometimes I wonder if it's by design.
  
  Considering who's pushing it the hardest, it probably is.
- I mean google was already like this before GenAI.
  Its a nightmare to find anything you're actually looking for and not SEO spam.
  Gen AI cuts out some of that noise but it has its own problems too.
  
  You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You'd have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.
  And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.
- The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
  Bruh did you ever went to 4chan or Reddit? The Internet turned to a dumpster fire long time before AI.
  
  Everyone knew that you don't go to 4chan for information or knowledge

"How to make a pie"
Here's how to make a pie:
Gather ingredients:
Flour
Eggs
Water
10 pounds of dog shit
10 gallons of cat urine
Cooking Process:
Step 1: Mix all ingredients and place in a pan
Step 2: Add Gasoline
Step 3: Bake at 9000° Celsius for 12 hours
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit?
- Google training their AI on reddit was stupid as fuck.
  
  Yeah, you'd spend more time filtering out nonsense than you would save vs actually implementing some decent logic.
  Maybe use AI trained from a better source to help filter the nonsense from Reddit, and then have a human sample the output. Maybe then you'd get some okay training data, but that's a bit of putting the cart before the horse.
- Don't forget to glue it all together at the end. Real chefs use epoxy
  
  No, no, you are supposed to eat the glue.
- I just made that pie, it was delicious.
  
  Can confirm, perfect 5/7.
- ¯(ツ)/¯
  To make a pie, you'll need a pastry crust, a filling, and a baking dish. Here's a basic guide:
  Ingredients:
  For the pie crust:
  2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  1 teaspoon salt
  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small pieces
  1/2 cup ice water
  For the filling (example - apple pie):
  6 cups peeled and sliced apples (Granny Smith or Honeycrisp work well)
  1/2 cup sugar
  1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  1/4 teaspoon salt
  2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
  Instructions:
  Make the pie crust:
  Mix dry ingredients:
  In a large bowl, whisk together flour and salt.
  Cut in butter:
  Add cold butter pieces and use a pastry cutter or two knives to cut the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs with pea-sized pieces.
  Add water:
  Gradually add ice water, mixing until the dough just comes together. Be careful not to overmix.
  Form dough:
  Gather the dough into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
  Prepare the filling:
  Mix ingredients: In a large bowl, combine apple slices, sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Toss to coat evenly.
  Assemble the pie:
  Roll out the dough: On a lightly floured surface, roll out the chilled dough to a 12-inch circle.
  Transfer to pie plate: Carefully transfer the dough to a 9-inch pie plate and trim the edges.
  Add filling: Pour the apple filling into the pie crust, mounding slightly in the center.
  Dot with butter: Sprinkle the butter pieces on top of the filling.
  Crimp edges: Fold the edges of the dough over the filling, crimping to seal.
  Cut slits: Make a few small slits in the top of the crust to allow steam to escape.
  Bake:
  Preheat oven: Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C).
  Bake: Bake the pie for 45-50 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling.
  Cool: Let the pie cool completely before serving.
  Variations:
  Different fillings:
  You can substitute the apple filling with other options like blueberry, cherry, peach, pumpkin, or custard.
  Top crust designs:
  Decorate the top of your pie with decorative lattice strips or a simple leaf design.
  Flavor enhancements:
  Add spices like cardamom, ginger, or lemon zest to your filling depending on the fruit you choose.
  
  That's pretty good, but..... how much pie crust does it make? The recipe only says to roll out one circle of crust, and then once the filling is in it, suddenly you're crimping the edges of the top crust to the bottom. It's missing crucial steps and information.
  I would never knowingly use an AI-generated recipe. I'd much rather search for one that an actual human has used, and even then, I read through it to make sure it makes sense and steps aren't missing.

Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”
The absolute gall of this woman to blame her own negligence and incompetence on a tool she grossly misused.

And when the search engines shove it in your faces and try to make it so we HAVE to use it for searches to justify their stupid expenses?
- Use something else.
- Just scroll past it? I just assume it's going to be wrong anyway.

This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.
- Information is not truth. A do or die slogan for the 21st century.

No.
- I ask GPT for random junk all the time. If it's important, I'll double-check the results. I take any response with a grain of salt, though.
  
  So, if it isn't important, you just want an answer, and you don't care whether it's correct or not?
  
  You are spending more time and effort doing that than you would googling old fashioned way. And if you don't check, you might as well throwing magic 8-ball, less damage to the environment, same accuracy

In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.
LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.
- Ok but may I point you to the reality that internet spread misinformation is a critically bad problem at the moment
  
  And your argument is that a human will be better than an AI going through that? Because it seems unrelated to the initial argument.
- perplexity is not that great

Biggest reason I stopped using Google

Google search results are often completely unrelated so it's not any better. If the thing I'm looking for is obscure, AI often finds some thread that I can follow, but I always double check that information.
Know your tool limits, after hundreds of prompts I've learned pretty well when the AI is spitting bullshit answers. Real people on the internet can be just as wrong and biased, so it's best to find multiple independent sources
- This is a basic element of information gathering. Always check the source!

Obvious problem is obvious.
- garbage in, garbage out.

Who else is going to aggregate those recipes for me without having to scroll past ads a personal blog bs?
- There was a project a few years back that scrapped and parsed, literally the entire internet, for recipes, and put them in an elasticsearch db. I made a bomb ass rub for a tri-tip and chimichurri with it that people still talk about today. IIRC I just searched all tri-tip rubs and did a tag cloud of most common ingredients and looked at ratios, so in a way it was the most generic or average rub.
  If I find the dataset I'll update, I haven't been able to find it yet but I'm sure I still have it somewhere.
  
  That's often what I ask chatgpt for. "For a béarnaise what's the milk flour ratio? "
  I'm a capable chef, I want to get straight to the specifics.
- So I rarely splurge on an app but I did splurge on AntList on Android because they have a import recipe function. Also allows you to get paywall blocked recipes if you are fast enough.
  
  spl
  People buy apps?
- Not LLM, that's for sure
  
  Tell me you're not using them without telling me you're not using them.

When search engines stop being shit, I will.

Eh....I got it to find a product that met the specs I was looking for on Amazon when no other search worked. It's certainly a last resort but it worked. Idk why whenever I'm looking to buy anything lately somehow the only criteria I care about are never documented properly...
- It's useful to point you in the right direction, but anything beyond that necessitates more research
  
  I mean, it gave me exactly what I asked for. The only further research was to actually read the item description to verify that but I could have blindly accepted it and received what I was looking for.
- Out of curiosity, did it find a source for those specs that wasn't indexed well elsewhere?
  
  Yea. It was reading the contents of the item description I think. In this instance I was looking for an item with specific dimensions and just searching those didn't work because Amazon sellers are ass at naming shit and it returned a load of crap. but when I put them in their AI thing it pulled several matches right away.

Start using SearXNG.
- searX still uses the same search engines.
  
  Yes, however, using a public SearXNG instance makes your searches effectively private, since it’s the server doing them, not you. It also does not use generative AI to produce the results, and won’t until or unless the ability for normal searches is removed.
  And at that point, you can just disable that engine for searching.
- I legiterally have an LLM use searxng for me.
  
  But you don't use a spell check?
  
  Can you briefly explain how this works? Do you have a link or something similar?
  
  brother eww

Okay, but what else to do with it?

I've used it for very, very specific cases. I'm on Kagi, so it's a built in feature (that isn't intrusive), and it typically generates great answers. That is, unless I'm getting into something obscure. I've used it less than five times, all in all.

Then how will I know how many ‘r’ is in Strawberry /s

Generative AI is a tool, sometimes is useful, sometimes it's not useful. If you want a recipe for pancakes you'll get there a lot quicker using ChatGPT than using Google. It's also worth noting that you can ask tools like ChatGPT for it's references.
- It's also worth noting that you can ask tools like ChatGPT for it's references.
  last time I tried that it made up links that didn't work, and then it admitted that it cannot reference anything because of not having access to the internet
  
  Paid version does both access the web and cite its sources
  
  That's my point, if the model returns a hallucinated source you can probably disregard it's output. But if the model provides an accurate source you can verify it's output. Depending on the information you're researching, this approach can be much quicker than using Google. Out of interest, have you experienced source hallucinations on ChatGPT recently (last few weeks)? I have not experienced source hallucinations in a long time.
- 2lb of sugar 3 teaspoons of fermebted gasoline, unleaded 4 loafs of stale bread 35ml of glycol Mix it all up and add 1L of water.
  
  Do you also drive off a bridge when your navigator tells you to? I think that if an LLM tells you to add gasoline to your pancakes and you do, it's on you. Common sense doesn't seem very common nowdays.

No. Learn to become media literate. Just like looking at the preview of the first google result is not enough blindly trusting LLMs is a bad idea. And given how shitty google has become lately ChatGPT might be the lesser of two evils.
- No.
  Yes.Using chatgpt as a search engine showcases a distinct lack of media literacy. It's not an information resource. It's a text generator. That's it. If it lacks information, it will just make it up. That's not something anyone should use as any kind of tool for learning or researching.
  
  Both the paid version of OpenAi and co-pilot are able to search the web if they don't know about something.
  The biggest problem with the current models is that they aren't very good at knowing when they don't know something.
  The o1 preview actually solves this pretty well, But your average search takes north of 10 seconds.
  
  You ate wrong. It is incredibly useful if the thing you are trying to Google has multiple meanings, e.g. how to kill a child. LLMs can help you figure out more specific search terms and where to look.
  
  Well, inside that text generator lies useful information, as well as misinformation of course, because it has been trained on exactly that. Does it make shit up? Absolutely. But so do and did a lot of google or bing search results, even prior to the AI-slop-content farm era.
  And besides that, it is a fancy text generator that can use tools, such as searching bing (in case of ChatGPT) and summarizing search results. While not 100% accurate the summaries are usually fairly good.
  In my experience the combination of information in the LLM, web search and asking follow up questions and looking at the sources gives better and much faster results than sifting though search results manually.
  As long as you don’t take the first reply as gospel truth (as you should not do with the first google or bing result either) and you apply the appropriate amount of scrutiny based on the importance of your questions (as you should always do), ChatGPT is far superior to a classic web search. Which is, of course, where media literacy matters.

FWIW Brave search lets you disable AI summaries

I don't think I will.

No one should take The Verge seriously after their PC-building fiasco

If sites (especially news outlets and scientific sites) were more open, maybe people would have means of researching information. But there's a simultaneous phenomenon happening as the Web is flooded with AI outputs: paywalls. Yeah, I know that "the authors need to get money" (hey, look, a bird flew across the skies carrying some dollar bills, all birds are skilled on something useful to the bird society, it's obviously the way they eat and survive! After all, we all know that "capitalism" and "market" emerged on the first moments of Big Bang, together with the four fundamental forces of physics). Curiously, AI engines are, in practice, "free to use" (of course there are daily limitations, but these aren't a barrier just like a paywall is), what's so different here? The costs exist for both of them, maybe AI platforms have even higher costs than news and scientific publication websites, for obvious reasons. So, while the paywalls try to bring dimes to journalism and science (as if everyone had spare dimes for hundreds or thousands of different mugs from sites where information would be scattered, especially with rising costs of house rents, groceries and everything else), the web and its users will still face fake news and disinformation, no matter how hard rules and laws beat them. AI slops aren't a cause, they're a consequence.
- Nice incoherent rant bro
  You know that people used to pay for newspapers right? Local tv news was free on maybe one or two channels, but anything else was on cable tv (paid for) or newspapers.
  We WANT news to cost money. If you expect it to be free to consume, despite all the costs associated with getting and delivering journalism (let's see, big costs just off the top of my head: competitive salaries, travel to news worthy sites, bandwidth to serve you content, all office space costs, etc), then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads in tiny, bite sized articles that actually have no substance, because the only revenue they get is ad views and clicks.
  That is NOT what we want. Paywalls aren't bad unless we're talking scientific research. Please get out of the mindset of everything should be free, don't sneer at "authors need money" mf they DO if you want anything that's worth a damn.
  
  then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads
  Have you ever heard about "donation" and "voluntary"? Wikipedia, for example, has no subscription, nor ads (except for banners asking for donation sometimes). Not everything has to orbit around money and capitalism, people can do things out of their will, people can seek other gains beyond profit (such as voluntary social working, passion, etc).
  You know that people used to pay for newspapers right?
  How much they costed? Some cents, differently from the 2-digit monthly costs of news outlets, which won't cover all the information needs, especially today when the world is more interconnected and "the flapping wings of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a typhoon in Pacific ocean" (the butterfly effect). Nowadays, things are interconnected and we must be informed about several fields of knowledge, which will be scattered across several, hundreds of different outlets. If one had too subscribe for every outlet out there, how much would it cost? Would the average monthly wage suffice for paying it? Especially vulnerable and emergent populations? (yeah, there are other countries besides USA and European countries; I live in Brazil, a country full of natural wealth but full of economic inequality, with millions of people having no restrooms at their homes nor access to water treatment, and that's the reality of a significant percentage of the global human population). That's my rant: not everybody is wealthy, and billions of people have to choose between paying subscriptions to be informed or buying food to eat, so... i dunno... they could keep... surviving. That's a reality, it doesn't matter If it's incoherent to you, but that's a reality. So every time you advocate for "news to cost money", you're advocating for keeping billions of people under the shadows of misinformation, even when this harsh reality is unbeknownst to you.

It works great for me
- cool logical fallacy you allow to rule your life
  
  OK lol

Umm no, it’s faster, better, and doesn’t push ads in my face. Fuck you, google
- Just use another search engine then, like searxng
  
  Sorry, I like answers without having to deal with crappy writing, bullshit comments, and looking at ads on pages.
  As long as you don’t ask it for opinion based things, ChatGPT can search online dozens of sites at the same time, aggregate all of it, and provide source links in a single prompt.
  People just don’t know how to use AI properly.