Yes, but search engines will serve you LLM generated slop instead of search results, and sites like Stack Overflow will die due to lack of visitors, so the internet will become a reddit-like useless LLM ridden hellscape completely devoid of any human users, and we’ll have to go back to our grandparents’ old dusty paper encyclopedias.

Eventually, in a decade or two, once the bubble has burst and google, meta, and all those bastards have starved each other to death, we might be able to start rebuilding a new internet, probably reinventing usenet over ad-hoc decentralised wifi networks, but we won’t get far, we’ll die in the global warming wars before we get it to any significant size.

At least some bastards will have made billions out of the scam, though, so there’s that, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

Sure does, but somehow many of the answers still work well enough. In many contexts, the hallucinations are only speed bumps, not show stopping disasters.

What I’m worried about are traditional indexers being intentionally nerfed, discontinued, or left unmaintained at best. I’ve often wondered what it would take to self host a personal indexer. I remember a time when search giant Alta Vista had a full text index of the then known internet on their DEC Alpha server(s).

To be fair, at the current state search engines work LLMs might not be the worst idea.

I’m looking for the 7800x3d, not 3D shooters, not the 1234x3d, no not the pentium 4, not the 4700rtx. It takes more and more effort to search something, and the first pages show every piece of crap I’m not interested in.

I think you will be in a loud minority, people don’t like additional work.

You only ignore AI slop when you recognize it as such.

And if LLM don’t have the actual answer they blabbering like a redditor, and if someone can’t get an accurate answer they start asking forum and socmed.

LLM’s are completely incapable of giving a correct answer, except by random chance.

They’re extremely good at giving what looks like a correct answer, and convincing their users that it’s correct, though.

When LLMs are the only option, people won’t go elsewhere to look for answers, regardless of how nonsensical or incorrect they are, because the answers will look correct, and we’ll have no way of checking them for correctness.

People will get hurt, of course. And die. (But we won’t hear about it, because the LLM’s won’t talk about it.) And civilization will enter a truly dark age of mindless ignorance.

But that doesn’t matter, because the company will have already got their money, and the line will go up.

The problem is that the LLMs have stolen all that information, repackaged it in ways that are subtly (or blatantly) false or misleading, and then hidden the real information behind a wall of search results that are entire domains of ai trash. It’s very difficult to even locate the original sources or forums anymore.

That’s true. There could be a balance of sorts. Who knows. If LLMs become increasingly useful, people start using them more. As they loose training data, quality goes down, and people shift back to forums etc. Could work that way too.

True, but soon the sources will be AI generated too, in a big GIGO loop.

I get the feeling that LLMs are designed to please humans, so uncomfortable answers like “I don’t know” are out of the question.

• This thing is broken. How do I fix it?
• Don’t know. 🤷
• Seriously? I need an answer? Any ideas?
• Nope. You’re screwed. Best of luck to you. Figure it out. I believe in you. ❤️

When diagnosing software related tech problems with proper instructions, there’s always the risk of finding outdated tips. You may be advised to press buttons that no longer exist in the version you’re currently using.

With hardware though, that’s unlikely to happen, as long as the model numbers match. However, when relying on AI generated instructions, anything is possible.

Trouble is that ‘quick answers’ mean the LLM took no time to do a thorough search.

LLMs don’t “search”. They essentially provide weighted parrot-answers based on what they’ve seen elsewhere.

If you tell an LLM that the sky is red, they will tell you the sky is red. If you tell them your eyes are the colour of the sky, they will repeat that your eyes are red. LLMs aren’t capable of checking if something is true.

Theyre just really fast parrots with a big vocabulary. And every time they squawk, it burns a tree.

Math problems are a unique challenge for LLMs, often resulting in bizarre mistakes. While an LLM can look up formulas and constants, it usually struggles with applying them correctly. Sort of, like counting the hours in a week, it says it calculates 7*24, which looks good, but somehow the answer is still 10 🤯. Like, WTF? How did that happen? In reality, that specific problem might not be that hard, but the same phenomenon can still be seen in more complicated problems. I could give some other examples too, but this post is long enough as it is.

For reliable results in math-related queries, I find it best to ask the LLM for formulas and values, then perform the calculations myself. The LLM can typically look up information reasonably accurately but will mess up the application. Just use the right tool for the right job, and you’ll be ok.

Is your abuse of the ellipsis and dashes supposed to be ironic? Isn’t that a LLM tell?

I’m not even sure what the (‘phrase’) construct is even meant to imply, but it’s wild. Your abuse of punctuation in general feels like a machine trying to convince us it’s human or a machine transcribing a human’s stream of consciousness.