Will LLMs make finding answers online a thing of the past?
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I did suggest a possible solution to this - the AI search agent itself could post a question in a forum somewhere if has been unable to find an answer.
This isn't a feature yet of mainstream AI search agents but I've been following development and this sort of thing is already being done by hobbyists. Agentic AI workflows can be a lot more sophisticated than simple "do a search summarize results." An AI agent could even try to solve the problem itself - reading source code, running tests in a sandbox, and so forth. If it figures out a solution that it didn't find online, maybe it could even post answers to some of those unanswered forum questions. Assuming the forum doesn't ban AI of course.
Basically, I think this is a case of extrapolating problems without also extrapolating the possibilities of solutions. Like the old Malthusian scenario, where Malthus projected population growth without also accounting for the fact that as demand for food rises new technologies for making food production more productive would also be developed. We won't get to a situation where most people are using LLMs for answers without LLMs being good at giving answers.
This idea about automated forum posts and answers could work. However, a human would also need to verify that the generated solution actually solves a problem. There are still some pretty big ifs and buts in this thing, but I assume it could work. I just don’t think current LLMs are quite smart enough yet. It’s a fast moving target, and new capabilities are bing added on a daily basis, so it might not take very long until we get there.
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You know I'm right and try to troll because you either dont like it or have an agenda. In both cases, thats a you problem.
So I take it you're not going to post those numbers, then.
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So I take it you're not going to post those numbers, then.
Of course not. It's literally 5 words in a search engine.
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At this rate that day is not too distant, I'm affraid.
I was expecting either Huxley or Orwell to be right, not both.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Interestingly, there’s an Intelligence Squared episode that explores that very point. As usual, there’s a debate, voting and both sides had some pretty good arguments. I’m convinced that Orwell and Huxley were correct about certain things. Not the whole picture, but specific parts of it.
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Of course not. It's literally 5 words in a search engine.
...which you can't or won't do, apparently.
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...which you can't or won't do, apparently.
I can and did, many times. I also wrote articles about it. I just wont do you the favor to post any of them here because I dislike your attitude. You're not open to debate. You're trying to use rhetoric tricks to get around arguments.
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Glad you agree. Non arguments are not a good idea.
No, your argument is stupid. OF COURSE those things are bad, its stupid to think that's what I implied.
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I can and did, many times. I also wrote articles about it. I just wont do you the favor to post any of them here because I dislike your attitude. You're not open to debate. You're trying to use rhetoric tricks to get around arguments.
I just wont do you the favor to post any of them
Why comment in the first place if you're unwilling to back it up?
This is a public forum, you're not just answering me here.
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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.
This applies equally well to human-generated answers to stuff.
True, the difference is that with humans it's usually more public, it is easier for someone to call bullshit. With LLMs the bullshit is served with the intimacy of embarrassing porn so is less likely to see any warnings.
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I just wont do you the favor to post any of them
Why comment in the first place if you're unwilling to back it up?
This is a public forum, you're not just answering me here.
For the reasons I mentioned in the comment before. It's easy to get that information and you're being disingenuous. Since you're still going on and going around the same argument free bullshit, I will now get rid of you. Good luck trolling someone else.
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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?
Probably, however I will not be doing that because LLM models are dogshit and hallucinate bullshit half the time. I wouldn't trust a single fucking thing that a LLM provides.
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No, your argument is stupid. OF COURSE those things are bad, its stupid to think that's what I implied.
You made a blanket statement and now you're angry because someone called you out on it. I get that. But i dont care. Please dont make blanket statements like that. Thats not a good way of debating stuff.
Of course outlawing of stuff is good in certain cases. And LLMs (and AI in general) as a public tool, exploited for profit, isn't good for humanity. It sucks energy like crazy, produces bullshit results, diseducates people and further benefits the capitalist class.
It's just not okay to have that. I would have gone with an argument that goes "but how about for personal use on your own computer?" Then I would say I can see that being okay, as long as it doesnt permanently increase everyones personal power usage because that is the same as if you had giant centralized AIs.
See? You can argue against my point without making self defeating statements.
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No. It hallucinates all the time.
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.
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Probably, however I will not be doing that because LLM models are dogshit and hallucinate bullshit half the time. I wouldn't trust a single fucking thing that a LLM provides.
Fair enough, and that’s actually really good. You’re going to be one of the few who actually go through the trouble of making an account on a forum, ask a single question, and never visit the place after getting the answer. People like you are the reason why the internet has an answer to just about anything.
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Fair enough, and that’s actually really good. You’re going to be one of the few who actually go through the trouble of making an account on a forum, ask a single question, and never visit the place after getting the answer. People like you are the reason why the internet has an answer to just about anything.
Haha. Yes I'll be a tech Boomer. Stuck in my old ways. Although answers on forums are often straight misinformation so really there's no perfect solution to get answers. You just have to cross check as many sources as possible.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
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.
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But LLMs truly excel at making their answers look correct. And at convincing their users that they are.
Humans are generally notoriously bad at that kind of thing, especially when our answers are correct.
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But LLMs truly excel at making their answers look correct. And at convincing their users that they are.
Humans are generally notoriously bad at that kind of thing, especially when our answers are correct.
Humans are generally notoriously bad at that kind of thing
Have you met humans? Many of them base their entire career on this skill.
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You made a blanket statement and now you're angry because someone called you out on it. I get that. But i dont care. Please dont make blanket statements like that. Thats not a good way of debating stuff.
Of course outlawing of stuff is good in certain cases. And LLMs (and AI in general) as a public tool, exploited for profit, isn't good for humanity. It sucks energy like crazy, produces bullshit results, diseducates people and further benefits the capitalist class.
It's just not okay to have that. I would have gone with an argument that goes "but how about for personal use on your own computer?" Then I would say I can see that being okay, as long as it doesnt permanently increase everyones personal power usage because that is the same as if you had giant centralized AIs.
See? You can argue against my point without making self defeating statements.
I'm not angry at all. I just think your response is childish.
