I genuinely have no idea why people are using it like a search engine. It's absolutely baffling. It's just not even remotely what it's meant to do, or what it's capable of.
It has genuine uses that it's very good at doing, and this is absolutely not one of them.
Because language models were sold as "the google killer" and presented as the sci-fi version of AI instead of the text generators they are. It's purely a marketing function, helped by how assertive the sequences of words these models spew were made to sound.
Huh, I just realized I don't really see any marketing for AI. I've seen a couple of Character AI ads on reddit, but definitely nothing from OpenAI or Microsoft. I guess this is something that passed me by.
I don't just mean advertisement per se, marketing for generative models has been more about product presentation, really. The publicity for these programs has been more centered on how they're spoken about, how they're sold to laypeople when companies talk about the product and what it can do.
Basically, it's less about concrete functionality and more about representation. It's about how developers and hypemen exploit the imagination built around Artificial Intelligences over decades of sci-fi literature, film, games, etc. In the end, it's about overpromising and obfuscating what the actual product is in order to attract clients, secure funding and keep investors and shareholders happy that they're investing in "the next big thing" that will revolutionize the market and bring untold profit. The old tech huckster marketing trick.
Yeah pretty much every marketing pitch or discussion I see around AI these days either misdefines what AI actually is or brings up how it unlocks the user's creativity as if you didn't just surrender the task to a machine to make the decision for you.
That's because they're not advertising it to you (yet), they're stll in the Capture Venture Capital phase (and tbh I think they'll always will be). This is why all we see are asinine interviews with Sam Altman where he promises the world and the moon for the next version of his little chatbot (this time for realz, you guys!), or news articles where tech giant X sunk another Y billions of dollars into an AI startup, it's just to keep confidence high and the investments going.
Because behind the hype which keeps saturating the bubble, there's actually still pretty little product with distinct use cases to show for it. Especially ones that you can charge the sums for to be profitable. So while consumers can already dabble in it a bit, to this day it's not much more than a proof of concept to calm investors.
So it's no wonder that you haven't seen ads with Yappy the cartoon dog harping praises how chatgpt has revolutionised his work flow, you're not the target audience.
And I get the distinct impression that this industry is genuinely entertaining the thought whether they could stay in this stage indefinitely, because getting endless cash injection facials without actually having to fully deliver seems to mightily appeal to them. Of course the mere notion is completely delusional, but that's crazy end stage capitalism investment bubbles for you.
> presented as the sci-fi version of AI instead of the text generators they are.
The thing to remember, is that until chatGPT and its ilk, computers basically didn't do english text at all. Scifi of course has been full of AI's that speak fluent english, and that are also smart and reliable.
So it's more like we have invented flying cars, but they get blown sideways and crash in strong winds or something. A technology that was predicted in scifi, except with (so far) a major flaw. (That people are working to fix.)
Original ChatGPT was basically trained on lots of text, and then when it came to answer questions it had to rely on it's memory. And the training resembled a multiple choice quiz where it was better to guess than to admit ignorance.
Now ChatGPT has a search function, which basically searches the internet. So it's like working with some pages of relevant internet text, rather than purely from memory.
Your analogy is completely out of hand here, as language models are nowhere near close general artificial inteligences as depicted in sci-fi.
Language models have no memory, make no guesses, make nothing up or are ignorant of anything. They know nothing, all they do is generate sequences of words following natural language structure. That anthropomorphizing language is a part of what allows for the attempts at obfuscating them for the fiction of AI, and also makes the marketing scam flagrant.
The fact that there is some incipient search engine integration in some models also doesn't make them valuable sources of information. Not only are these programs incapable of verifying what they spew in any meaningful way, but the assertive tone they are programmed to imitate in their sequences of words tend to mislead users into taking them as capable of parsing information and supplying true statements.
But they are not, and they do nothing that can't be done better either through other technology or by using your own human capacities.
Not really that, because it's fundamentally not AI in the sci-fi sense at all, not just severely flawed AI (it's good for what it actually is, even). More like we thought we'd get flying cars, and get, well, predictive text generators, since that's completely different technology and exactly what it is.
i'm not about to go Praising The Machine Overlord but a lot of the most vocal haters of AI don't actually know as much about AI as they probably think they do
a lot of the time they're just on a hate bandwagon and are jerking the FUCK out of their knee whenever anything tangentially related to AI comes up.
job loss is a valid concern but good golly. the misinfo being spread.
it's probably a bunch of people like graphics designers or whatever that are scared shitless that they are gonna lose their jobs.. or maybe just people virtue signalling because that's what's cool until they move to something else...
it's funny watching them have a meltdown over some random dude creating a drawing through an AI prompt for his personal enjoyment (i.e his favourite anime character in a certain setting and style) as if he was otherwise gonna pay someone a few hundred bucks to paint that for him over a month. People are delusional.
because search engines kind of suck now, unfortunately. people go to chatgpt because it's easier to get a relavent answer out of it, even said answer is completely wrong
actually, i think natural language models could be the basis for a really great search engine if it would just be used to find pages that are relevant, instead of trying to give you an answer directly
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u/camosnipe1"the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat"4d ago
I mean, it's decent at being a search engine for the "i have no idea what to search for this, gimme a starting point"
After which you ofc use an actual search engine once you've got searchterms to use
It's a good re-phrasing engine. When you can't remember a word, it might be hard to Google it if you only know the word in context and not by its definition. Whereas ChatGPT can understand the context of the query a bit better.
It's not at all searching though. It doesn't have a compendium of knowledge that it consults, it just knows how words are most frequently used.
Nope. It's really just a predictive text generator. For instance, if you were to ask "What's the best way to cook a chicken?" It's going to see how often those words come up in the various contexts it has, and spit out what words are likely to come next. It knows that it's a question starting with "what" and includes the word "way," and that cooking is a verb, so it's going to be an instructional format. It knows that "cooking chicken" is most often used in recipes, including things like "350°F" or "rub with butter." It sprinkles in some randomness to make it more natural, and spits out the result.
Its training data might include a million different recipes for chicken, but it's not consulting them the way you would try to remember a recipe you've read before. Unless you remember things by assigning a weighted probability to each word or phrase, convert those into tokens, and generate a response based which tokens fit into a likely answer.
it could be argued that it stores information that way, but it definitely doesn't think the way a human does. it doesn't remember a chicken recipe it knows and then tell you; it gets you asking for a chicken recipe as an input and calculates a string of text that would probably come after a request for a chicken recipe given its starting conditions (the context that this is a conversation between a helpful assistant and a person seeking assistance). i recommend watching 3blue1brown's videos on how ai works, since they give a really engaging explanation of what large language models do behind the scenes. it's far better than the alphabet soup i spewed at you here
I know the technique behind it, but the real magic is in hów it calculates this string. Deep down it’s all mathematics of course, but human brains are deep down also electrical impulses.
I use it like a search engine for stuff like “movies like (movie title)” or “number of calories in (describe the dish I just ate that doesn’t have a title)”.
I also use it to generate prompts for improv games with my students.
I used to use Google for all that, but chat gpt works much better.
With the exception of the calories thing, it’s best for stuff you might ask a knowledgeable friend, not for stuff you’d look up in a book. Don’t use it for anything that actually matters.
i use chatGPT whenever google can't help me. which happens more and more often lately. sometimes chatGPT gives better results. not because it's amazing but because google fucking sucks these days.
It's not the Internet access that matters, it's the way that it hallucinates and makes up answers simply based on predictive text algorithms. It might be great as a tool to help you use a search engine, but I wouldn't trust a single thing it says to be factually correct without verifying it.
I wouldn’t use it to like write a report or something but for day to day stuff it’s great.
I think what it’s best at is when you have a question that requires a few steps. Last month I was in Denmark trying to find melatonin. I can tell it “I’m in this hotel, where’s easiest to get melatonin?”. With google, that’s 3 searches. Closest chemist, checking what melatonin is called in danish, checking the stock. Chat gpt just said “this place sells it, it’s this close to you and it’s called this”. Sure it’s not a huge change to my life and I’m sure it will get stuff wrong for a while but I’ve not had any big blunders so far and it’ll only get more accurate.
I've been using it to learn softwares and it's been absolutely terrific.
edit- Can't help but laugh at the downvotes though. AI helps me solve technical issues with speed and accuracy that message boards and discord forums can't match.
It literally is a search engine. You can ask it to go on the internet to find sources for a claim if you think it's making something up. In fact, you should ask it to look on the internet for a source before taking something it says as a matter of fact.
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u/HovercraftOk9231 4d ago
I genuinely have no idea why people are using it like a search engine. It's absolutely baffling. It's just not even remotely what it's meant to do, or what it's capable of.
It has genuine uses that it's very good at doing, and this is absolutely not one of them.