Describes my general experience with AI across the board. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It’s like I’m talking to a genius toddler. With ChatGPT losing 5 billion dollars on 3.7B in revenue this is unsustainable. It feels like the dotcom bubble all over again.
This is true, but fairly or unfairly, asking a question to a chat bot feels like “opting in” to the possibility that the answers you get will be hallucinated garbage, in a way that doing a Google search does not. It’s a tough problem for Google to overcome— the fact that they will be held to a higher standard—- but that’s what it is: we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an outrage.
It invents citations too, constantly. You could look up the things it cites, although at that point, what are you actually gaining?
And I’m not saying this makes them useless: I pay for Claude and am a reasonably happy customer, despite the occasional bullshit. But none of that is relevant to my point that the bots get held to a different standard than Google search and I don’t see an easy way for Google to deal with that.
What part is “trolling”? Paid users have been able to use ChatGPT using the built in web browsing plug in for over a year just by saying “please provide citations” or “verify that”.
What you say has been around for a few weeks has literally been around for paid users for over a year
> we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an outrage.
Sort of. Top results for any kind of question that applies to general population - health, lifestyle, etc. - are usually complete bullshit too. It's all pre-AI slop known as content marketing.
The mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel the need to force it on users, because they know that a significant portion of users would switch it off if they could.
The difficulty of verifying the answer isn't-wrong is another important factor. Bad search results are often obvious, but LLM nonsense can have tricky falsehoods.
If a process gives false results half the time, and verifying any result takes half as long as deriving a correct solution yourself... Well, I don't know the limiting sum of the infinite series offhand, but it's a terrible tool.
Which would be great, except for that I found the top google result to be more than 70% relevant to my searches in the past, its a clear downgrade of relevancy.
