A new study from Columbia Journalism Review showed that AI search engines and chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Deepseek Search, Microsoft Copilot, Grok and Google’s Gemini, are just wrong, way too often.
I miss the days when Google would just give a snippet of a Wikipedia article at the top and you just click the “read more” button. It may not have been exactly what you were looking for but at least it wasn’t blatantly wrong. Nowadays you have to almost scroll down to the bottom just to find something relevant.
i almost think this is getting worse as the internet grows, there’s so much more information out there now and it’s easier and easier to push content further. i’m not surprised it’s more and more difficult to filter through the bs
I’m confidently wrong a lot of the time too. But I mainly do that just to fuck with people.
When LLMs are wrong they are only confidently wrong. They don’t know any other way to be wrong.
They do not know wright from wrong, they only know probability of the next word.
LLMs are a brute forcing of the immigration of intelligence. They do not think, they are not intelligent.
But I mean people today believe that 5G vaccines made the frogs gay.
We only notice when they are wrong, but they can also be right just by accident.
This does seem to be exactly the problem. It is solvable, but I haven’t seen any that do it. They should be able to calculate a confidence value based on number of corresponding sources, quality ranking of sources, and how much interpolation of data is being done vs. Straightforward regurgitation of facts.
I haven’t seen any evidence that this is solvable. You can feed in more training data, but that doesn’t mean generative AI technology is capable of using that in the way you describe.
In all seriousness, studies are the first step to general knowledge outside professional circles and by extension, legislation made on it.
LLMs hallucinate. In other words, water is wet
They get you 80 to 90 percent close to generally solving most problems asked. Sure they need fact checked as any info does. They are of major use in all areas of study and life. Just not the god everyone wants it to be.
They are less useful than a Wikipedia search and a dictionary. They can functionally replace humans in 0 fields that were not already automatable by machines. They are useless in any situation that warrants any degree of caution about safety.
85-90% is way over-estimated, it gets significantly worse dealing with specific tasks. And even if it was 85-90%, that’s not good enough, even remotely, for just about anything. Humans make errors too, but inconsistently and inversely proportional to experience. This makes no difference to the LLM though, it will always make errors at that exact rate. The kinds of errors it can make are also not just missteps but often pure delusion and very far from what the input was requesting. They cannot reason. They have no rationale. They’re imitation in its most empty form. They cannot even so much as provide information reliably.
They also ruin every single industry they come into contact with, and even worse they have utterly destroyed the usability of the internet. LLMs are a net negative for humanity in so many different ways. They deserve as much attention and investment as chatbots did back in 2005.
Their best use case scenario is in churning out an endless amount of lifeless soleless jpg background noise and word salad articles. Their best use case is in tricking people into giving them money or ad revenue. Scamming is the only thing they are anywhere near functionally useful for.
Then again, so has the search engines themselves been proven to be wrong, inaccurate and just plain irrelevant. I’ve asked questions in Google before about things I need to know in general about my state out of curiosity and it’s results always pull up different states that do not apply to mine.
well that’s common, but the big thing is, you can see what you are working with. Big difference in at least knowing you need to try a different site when say
Google: Law about X in state1
Top result: Law about X in state3: It’s illegal
Result 2 pages in: here’s a list of each page and whether law X is legal in your state… (State 1 legal)
Versus chatgpt
Is X legal in state1?
Chatgpt: No
Yeah because you’re not supposed to ask search engines questions, you’re supposed to use keywords.
