Comment on Gemini wont talk about Bernie Sanders

Squorlple@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I mostly can’t understand why people are so into “LLMs as a substitute for Web search”, though there are a bunch of generative AI applications that I do think are great, but I did realize that for people who want to use their cell phone via voice, LLM queries can be done without hands or eyes getting involved. Web searches cannot.

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  • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    While I mostly agree, I have used LLMs to help me find some truly obscure stuff or things a normal web search would take a long time to sift through a lot of sources that are too generalized. An LLM can give you the exact thing from a more generic search, then I can take that specific output to find the detailed source.

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  • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Because web search was intentionally hobbled by Google so people are pushed to make more searches and see more ads.

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    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:

      • DuckDuckGo
      • Ecosia
      • Marginalia
      • Million Short
      • Swiss Cows

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      • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Do any of them actually work? As in, you search something and it gives you relevant results to the whole thing you typed in?

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      • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Or all of the above, using SearXNG.

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      • Nollij@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        DDG and Ecosia are proxies for Bing. I didn’t check, but I’m guessing the others are too. Most “independent” search engines are.

        The major exception is Startpage, which is a proxy for Google.

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  • Squorlple@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Would saying “Gemini, open the Wikipedia page for Bernie Sanders and read me the age it says he is”, for example, suffice as a voice input that both bypasses subject limitations and evades AI bullshitting?

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    • brb@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Gemini refuses to answer

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      Copilot seems to know the current date and calculates the age from that

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      ChatGPT is clueless

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    • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Idk if it bypasses limitations, you can try. As for bullshiting, no. The AI almost certainly does not have the ability to go and open a webpage. If it was trained on wikipedia, it may give you the age listed at the time of it’s training. If not, it will likely take a different source and pretend it is from wikipedia. Either way, it will likely bullshit you about doing what you asked while giving you outdated/wrong information.

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  • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Web searches cannot

    Web search by voice was a solved problem in my recent memory. Then it got shitty again

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    • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      google literally has a voice button.

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      • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        The problem isn’t conducting the search with voice, it’s receiving any actual information back. A few years ago I would ask a question and receive an answer based off the top few results, and if it couldn’t scrape something together it would just give me the results instead.

        I haven’t used voice search in a while because of the issues that started to arise, but I have less fond memories of “hey Siri, answer this.” And then having to go find my phone anyway to Google it because she was useless

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• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  To be honest, that seems like it should be the one thing they are reliably good at. It requires just looking up info on their database, with no manipulation.

  Obviously that’s not the case, but that’s just because currently LLMs are a grift to milk billions from corporations by using the buzzwords that corporate middle management relies on to make it seem like they are doing any work. Relying on modern corporate FOMO to get them to buy a terrible product that they absolutely don’t need at exorbitant contract prices just to say they’re using the “latest and greatest” technology.

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  • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be honest, that seems like it should be the one thing they are reliably good at. It requires just looking up info on their database, with no manipulation.

    That’s not how they are designed at all. LLMs are just text predictors. If the user inputs something like “A B C D E F” then the next most likely word would be “G”.

    Companies like OpenAI will try to add context to make things seem smarter, like prime it with the current date so it won’t just respond with some date it was trained on, or look for info on specific people or whatnot, but at its core, they are just really big auto fill text predictors.

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  • DrFistington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah, I still struggle to see the appeal of Chatbot LLMs. So it’s like a search engine, but you can’t see it’s sources, and sometimes it ‘hallucinates’ and gives straight up incorrect information. My favorite was a few months ago I was searching Google for why my cat was chewing on plastic. Like halfway through the AI response at the top of the results it started going on a tangent about how your cat may be bored and enjoys to watch you shop, lol

    So basically it makes it easier to get a quick result if you’re not able to quickly and correctly parse through Google results… But the answer you get may be anywhere from zero to a hundred percent correct. And you don’t really get double check the sources without further questioning the chat bot. Oh and LLM AI models have been shown to intentionally lie and mislead when confronted with inaccuracies they’ve given.

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, I still struggle to see the appeal of Chatbot LLMs.

      I think that one major application is to avoid having humans on support sites. Some people aren’t willing or able or something to search a site for information, but they can ask human-language questions. I’ve seen a ton of companies with AI-driven support chatbots.

      There’s sexy chatbots. What I’ve seen of them hasn’t really impressed me, but you don’t always need an amazing performance to keep an aroused human happy. I do remember, back when I was much younger, trying to gently tell a friend who had spent multiple days chatting with “the sysadmin’s sister” on a BBS that he’d been talking to a chatbot – and that’s a lot simpler than current systems. There’s probably real demand, though I think that this is going to become commodified pretty quickly.

      There’s the “works well with voice control” aspect that I mentioned above. That’s a real thing today, especially when, say, driving a car.

      It’s just not – certainly not in 2025 – a general replacement for Web search for me.

      I can also imagine some ways to improve it down the line. Like, okay, one obvious point that you raise is that if a human can judge the reliability of information on a website, that human having access to the website is useful. I feel like I’ve got pretty good heuristics for that. Not perfect – I certainly can get stuff wrong – but probably better than current LLMs do.

      But…a number of people must be really appallingly awful at this. People would not be watching conspiracy theory material on wacky websites if they had a great ability to evaluate it. It might be possible to have a bot that has solid-enough heuristics that it filters out or deprioritizes sources based on reliability. A big part of what Web search does today is to do that – it wants to get a relevant result to you in the top few results, and filter out the dreck. I bet that there’s a lot of room to improve on that. Like, say I’m viewing a page of forum text. Google’s PageRank or similar can’t treat different content on the page as having different reliability, because it can only choose to send you to the page or not at some priority. But an AI training system can, say, profile individual users for reliability on a forum, and get a finer-grained response to a user. Maybe a Reddit thread has material from User A who the ranking algorithm doesn’t consider reliable, and User B who it does.

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• Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Especially something so trivial. If you use it to learn about some larger conflict or something, fine (though don’t expect accuracy). If you’re using for age, which has been trivial to find with a quick search for at least a decade, something has gone wrong with you. It’s the higher effort option for a worse result.

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• _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Maybe it’s easier to talk to than a real person. Real people have differing opinions, which is rude.

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• skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Have you seen the web lately?

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• Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  To see if it can do it and how accurate its general knowledge is compared to the real data. A locally hosted LLM doesnt leak private data to the internet. Most webpages and reddit post in search results are themselves LLM generated slop.

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