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- 13 days
All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
13 daysIt’s like getting the info from some rando at some party. It’s to be lightly penciled in.
- 12 days
If you need nuance and background, wikipedia is NOT the place to get that. Maybe you can get some good links at the bottom of the page to real information, but that can be hit or miss also.
- 13 days
for any question worth asking
Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don’t need pages of context, are not worth asking?
- 13 days
I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an “answer” with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don’t contain the actual info being presented.
- 12 days
AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It’s absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It’s like we’re collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
What’s even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just “define socks” and you’d get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?
- 12 days
Indeed.
I’m pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don’t want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.
I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful
- 12 days
If it didn’t do the AInsearch repeatedly they couldn’t use the billions of daily searches to artificially boost their AI engagement metrics and further inflate this bubble.
- BeMoreCareful@lemmy.worldEnglish12 days
Wikipedia has an app. It’s half of why I Google stuff. Usually a good place for quick answers, and an ok place to start digging in.
I’m half amazed at how bad Google has gotten, but that’s probably just me remembering the early days of web searches.
- Smoogs@lemmy.worldEnglish12 days
Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.
That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.
- 12 days
LLMs fundamentally can’t learn. They will continue to fail the same thing over and over until they guess and check into a response that appears coherent and correct.
AI has never been 100% accurate to the documents it pretends to reference, so the fact that anybody could even consider reading it like it’s not pure gibberish is mind boggling to me.
- 12 days
I gave Claude a document to proofread today. It came back with an error. Clause said I used “told” instead of “tell.” The error ended up being Claude’s error, as I used “tell,” and it was just confused.
This was the first time I ever used Claude. Just wanted to see what it was like. It did apologize, in fairness. But yeah, it’s clearly fallible. I guess I don’t understand it well enough to get how it read the document incorrectly. I’m baffled.
- 11 days
I’ve replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p
I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.
- 12 days
But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026… (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
- 12 days
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
- 12 days
Let them waste money on generating an AI overview I’ll happily skip on my way to the wikipedia link.
- hunt4peas@lemmy.mlEnglish12 days
I have it disabled through an extension on my phone’s Iceraven browser. Can’t bother reading those. I need the Wikipedia/website info.
The funniest part is I’ve gotten better answers from duckeuckgo and Bing’s AI back in the day because they both didn’t treat reddit as a reputable source of info lmao.
Dunno how the scene is now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its the same.
My go to. I used to use Google for harder to search stuff, but these days Google isnt worth the try anymore.
- 12 days
When the old new ways become the old ways and i cant keep up with the new new ways
Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears’ quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an “illegal handoff”, which I had never seen before.
I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like “Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!”
I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can’t do that.
AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.
- 12 days
It would have been a legal play IF the lineman had checked in with the referee as an “eligible” receiver before the play. But evidently he screwed up and report in. It’s not a common play in the NFL, but every team has such a play on hand.
So that’s kind of a “it needs context” question.
Yeah exactly. The AI was just wrong and said it’s legal as long as you hand it off behind the line of scrimmage. I actually still have the screenshot he sent. Notice the 2nd bullet point.
It’s not just wrong. It’s plausibly wrong, which is worse. It’s the difference between giving someone a recipe for cookies where you fuck up the ratio of flour and sugar vs giving someone a recipe for cooking where you’ve jokingly put “50 pounds of gunpowder” in there as an ingredient. People know the obvious wrong thing is wrong. But they’ll bake the fucked up ratio cookies and then just not know what went wrong.
- 12 days
This grew from ‘I don’t want Wikipedia, I’ll pay $150 a month to Encyclopaedia Brittannica for a set of 60 books the way God intended…’
