this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

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[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Okay but the problem with that is that LLMs not only don't have any fidelity at all, they can't. They are analogous to the language planning centre of your brain, which has to be filtered through your conscious mind to check if it's talking complete crap.

People don't realise this and think the bot is giving them real information, but it's actually just giving them spookily realistic word-salad, which is a big problem.

Of course you can fix this if you add some kind of context engine for them to truly grasp the deeper and wider meaning of your query. The problem with that is that if you do that, you've basically created an AGI. That may first of all be extremely difficult and far in the future, and second of all it has ethical implications that go beyond how effective of a search engine it is.

[–] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world -2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't need perfect. I need good enough

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Sure but if that becomes the norm then a huge segment of the population will believe the first thing the bot tells them. You might be okay, but we're talking about an entire society filtering its knowledge through an incredibly effective misinformation engine that will lie rather than say "I don't know", because that simple phrase requires a level of self-awareness that eludes a lot of actual people, much less a chatbot.

[–] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's already a problem. The thing j think about is what will serve me better. Google or chat AI. The risk of bad information exists with both. But an AI based search engine is something that will be much better at finding context, retiring results geared towards my goals and I suspect less prone to fuckery because AI must be trained as a whole

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Except we already know that LLMs lie and people in general are not aware of this. Children are using these. When you as a person have to sift through results you get a sense of what information is out there, how sparse it is, etc. When a chatbot word-vomits the first thing it can think of to satisfy your answer, you get none of that, and perhaps you should be aware of that yourself. You don't really seem to be, it's like you think the saved time is more important than context, which apparently I have to remind you - the bot doesn't know context.

When you say:

an AI based search engine is something that will be much better at finding context

It makes me think that you really don't understand how these bots work, and that's the real danger.

We're talking in this thread about this wider systemic issue, not just what suits you personally regardless of how much it gaslights you, but if that's all you care about then you do you I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯