Will LLMs make finding answers online a thing of the past?
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
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No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
I think you will be in a loud minority, people don't like additional work.
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I think you will be in a loud minority, people don't like additional work.
Even "let me Google that for you" was popular only some years ago. Yes, people are lazy, unthinking hedonists most of the time. In the absence of some sort of strict moral basis, society degenerates because only the tiniest minority will even think about things to try to establish some personal rules.
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No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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).
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I think you will be in a loud minority, people don't like additional work.
Probably
But I don't see it as work
"Work" is unfucking a situation that I created by being lazy in the first place rather than doing something properly
I'm probably showing my age though...
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Even "let me Google that for you" was popular only some years ago. Yes, people are lazy, unthinking hedonists most of the time. In the absence of some sort of strict moral basis, society degenerates because only the tiniest minority will even think about things to try to establish some personal rules.
I still use https://lmgtfy.com/ as a public shame for anyone that can't be arsed to put in a bit of effort to find something.
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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).
Alta Vista was great!
Now I'm definitely showing my age...
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No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
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.
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
And where does LLM take the answer? Forum and socmed. 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.
So no, LLM will not replace human interaction because LLM relies on human interaction. LLM cannot diagnose your car without human first diagnose your car.
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And where does LLM take the answer? Forum and socmed. 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.
So no, LLM will not replace human interaction because LLM relies on human interaction. LLM cannot diagnose your car without human first diagnose your car.
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.
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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).
The problem lies with the way the “modern” internet works by loading everything dynamically. Static pages to index are becoming more rare. Also a lot of information is being “lost” in proprietary systems like discord. Those also can’t be indexed (easily)
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No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
You only ignore AI slop when you recognize it as such.
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
LLMs are awesome in their knowledge until you start to hear its answers to stuff you already know and makes you wonder if anything was correct.
What they call hallucinations in other areas was called fabulations, to invent tales or stories.
I'm curious about what is the shortest acceptable answer for these things and if something close to "I don't know" is even an option.
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You only ignore AI slop when you recognize it as such.
I specifically ignore the google "AI summary"
I also tend to go through the results until I get something from a qualified source.
I'm sure I'm getting some of the aforementioned AI slop, but I would wager that I'm getting better results than the people I know who specifically look for an AI summary.
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
There have been enough times that I googled something, saw the AI answer at the top, and repeated it like gospel. Only to look like a buffoon when we realize the AI was completely wrong.
Now I look right past the AI answer and read the sources it's pulling from. Then I don't have to worry about anything misinterpreting the answer.
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
LLMs are the big block V8 of search engines. They can do things very fast and consume tons of resources with subterranean efficiency. On top of that, they are privacy invasive, easy to use for manipulation and speed up the problem of less mature users being spoon fed. General purpose LLMs need to be outlawed immediately.
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There have been enough times that I googled something, saw the AI answer at the top, and repeated it like gospel. Only to look like a buffoon when we realize the AI was completely wrong.
Now I look right past the AI answer and read the sources it's pulling from. Then I don't have to worry about anything misinterpreting the answer.
True, but soon the sources will be AI generated too, in a big GIGO loop.
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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
No. It hallucinates all the time.
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True, but soon the sources will be AI generated too, in a big GIGO loop.
That’s exactly what I’m worried about happening. What If one day there are hardly any sources left?
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LLMs are awesome in their knowledge until you start to hear its answers to stuff you already know and makes you wonder if anything was correct.
What they call hallucinations in other areas was called fabulations, to invent tales or stories.
I'm curious about what is the shortest acceptable answer for these things and if something close to "I don't know" is even an option.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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