DISCLAIMER: I’M NOT AN EXPERT ON ANY OF THIS, I’M JUST ANOTHER NERD ON THE INTERNET. DON’T QUOTE ME… OR AT LEAST ASK ME FIRST, OK?
Original post on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1706384660316774894
This upsets me. And I felt the need to rant about it a little in longform (well, longer than a tweet or three), and what-do-you-know I have a place to do that kind of thing now!
If you don’t understand what’s going on in the screenshot, and why I’m upset about it:
(1) A website [Quora] is using AI [ChatGPT] to generate answers to questions, many of the answers are incorrect because AI at this point ***doesn’t understand what is correct and what is not***, it is simply generates text based on what it thinks might be a good response to your query. This means it often makes things up or “hallucinates” things that it thinks are true. You can NEVER trust ChatGPT’s answers as fact.
(2) Quora then has “gamed” its web pages according to how Google’s algorithm works to make them appear at the top of Google searches for questions included in its database.
(3) Google, in its quest to get us answers to queries as quickly as possible, copies info from webpages directly into its search results, so that you don’t have to click the webpages.
THE PROBLEM HERE is that Google’s quickest response to many queries now is essentially AI generated nonsense and cannot be trusted. This means that unless Google does something to reverse a LARGE AND COMPELX CHAIN OF DECISIONS that resulted in it relying on AI, trust on the internet is going to (continue to) TANK, and places where you generally could expect truthful and real answers are going to be filled with more and more garbage, until it becomes largely useless! Hooray!!!
Get used to the idea of ditching Google and going directly to websites you are CERTAIN you can trust, or heck your local library, for answers, research, and so on.