[michaericalribo]

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place!

We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes turn into raisins.

[mort96]

We fact check search engine results all the time. But most of the time, such fact checking is in the form of looking at a result, considering whether it seems like a credible source, seeing if multiple credible-seeming results have the same answer, etc.

Getting a completely untrustworthy, unsourced response seems worse than useless. Google has been going this way for a while, with its instant answers or whatever, but at least those try to cite a search result and you can read the surrounding context which Google got the result from.

[add-sub-mul-div]

We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

A few sources will control the information we get in a much more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from now.

If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational search results distracting us, we'd never tolerate that in principle.

[pphysch]

> We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

There's nothing fundamentally new about this. The average person is blissfully unaware of the conversations being had between powerful individuals, PR experts, producers, and so on about how said person should be manipulated.

[amatecha]

I pretty much have this ever-present aura of "citation needed" floating around in my head when I listen to people speak. Any kind of news/press thing, politician speaking (lol), or just anyone trying to claim/assert anything -- I can feel nothing but "citation needed" until they provide some kind of supporting evidence. I feel like people expend a shocking amount of energy proclaiming things they literally do not know with even the slightest degree of certainty - they saw it on some guy's sensational YouTube video and repeat it uncritically. The fatigue is real.

[pphysch]

Even a citation is insufficient nowadays. They will cite a "reputable" source like NYT, which in turn cites "an anonymous intelligence official", and so on. Unverifiable.

Misinformation and manufactured narratives are omnipresent and all we can do is consume as diverse a media diet as possible and develop a good nose for bullsh*t.

[dougmwne]

Oh please. As if the reputation of any news outlet even matters anymore. They all fired their real journalists and fact checkers long ago. Everything you read is full of inaccuracies, agenda pushing and misinformation. If you think it doesn’t, you’ve been had.

[spindle]

That's true of (commercial) news outlets. It doesn't apply to "everything you read". There are many ways to check facts that don't rely on news outlets, at least for people who have time and resources.

[dougmwne]

But relevant to the topic at hand, do any of those sources regularly make it onto the search engine results page? Is the quality of Forbes, Cnet, Reddit, Wikipedia and Quora clearly better than these AI generated responses in some way?

I know there are expert vetted information sources, but you generally have to pay for the quality and they do not get linked to from Bing and Google.

[somenameforme]

I don't know exactly what he was referencing but the easiest way to verify the authenticity of points on issues where there tend to be two sides saying mutually incompatible things is to look at the overlap of what they both say is true. That is going to usually be true. And all it takes to find that is to look at sources for both sides.

Expert vetting doesn't even touch the underlying problem, because the pursuit is not expertise, in and of itself, but objectivity. And that's something far scarcer than expertise, and increasingly fleeting in today's world. A Chinese expert is probably going to have a different perspective on e.g. the Uyghurs than an America expert on such, even if both are in no way trying to mislead but giving their most sincere analysis of the situation.

Even on topics that are not conventionally controversial, you'll find a similar issue. Ask two astrophysicists of different worldviews on dark matter, and you are going to get two very different answers that, in many ways, will be incompatible. Simply "believing" one over the other doesn't really make any sense, nor does randomly polling astrophysicists and taking that as the definitive truth.

[jug]

For the record, the “New Bing” AI results will not be unsourced but with key facts in sentences tagged in Wikipedia style, pointing towards the source URL. Finally, below the reply there will be a domain summary for an overview but where each domain name is clickable to get to the respective articles on said domains.

In this case, Bing AI will operate very differently from ChatGPT.

[whatshisface]

In which case we would expect an LLM-based system to output something like,

"(Fact that isn't true)[Source that does not make that claim but comes close enough that you wouldn't notice it just by skimming]"

leading to even more people thinking it's true than otherwise.

[lmm]

Again this is already something that the human equivalents (low-end PR etc.) do all the time.

[somenameforme]

This is going to get real nasty when you start getting into science of various sorts, where an increasing number of papers, particularly in the social sciences, tend to make extreme and outlandish claims, but then walk them back extensively in the actual paper itself emphasizing it's just a correlation, or otherwise demonstrating an extremely marginal effect.

Yet the media tends to miss the internationally understated nuance and run with the claims at face value, which an LLM will then pick up on and state, "Yes scientists have proven that [x] does cause [y]. [1][2][3][4][5]" That claim then gets repeated elsewhere, and eventually that "elsewhere" goes on to become part of the LLM's new training material where it's basically training off its own output.

It'd be ironic if something that's ideally designed to make the breadth of human knowledgeable more readily available and accessible than ever before, ends up just making society vastly more misinformed than ever before.

[acdha]

Instant answers seem like a cautionary example since Google has gotten a fair amount of flack over the cases where it inaccurately summarized content. I think these services are going to be very interesting to study whether the average person thinks they're more authoritative because they're branded by a huge corporation and whether that'll decline over time as people realize the limitations.

[mort96]

It's weird. I've personally experienced cases where the highlighted instant answer is obviously incorrect and the full context actually claims the opposite of what the excerpt claims, and those kinds of examples circulate around the web pretty frequently, and everyone who has ever tried to ask ChatGPT or similar systems tricky questions should know how AIs just invent stuff when they don't know the real answers.

So why do companies like Microsoft and Google push in this direction? Why are they making the results more and more opaque? You'd hope that they would care enough to be good stewards of the power granted to them through their information monopoly, but barring that, you'd hope that they'd recognize that people want results they can verify, not just random answers.

Or maybe they're hoping that people don't care about verifying results, hoping that people just want an answer that's not necessarily the right answer? It seems like a dangerous gamble.

[acdha]

It really goes back to the toxic incentives of ad sales. Google wants you to stay on Google.com so they get more chances to show ads. They only care about low quality results if it means you stop using them, which for years wasn’t a serious risk but can change relatively quickly if alternatives arise. They should know, given how rapidly they pulled users away from Alta Vista, Yahoo!, et al. 20 years ago.

[keammo1]

I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI, especially the info snippets that appear at the top of Google's SERPs.

For example, until a few months the results for "pork cooked temperature" and "chicken cooked temperature" were returning incorrect values, boldly declaring too low of a temperature right at the top of the page (I know these numbers can vary based on how long the meat is at a certain temperature, but I verified Google was parsing the info incorrectly from the page it was referencing, pulling the temperature for the wrong kinds of meat). This was potentially dangerous incorrect info IMO

[mianos]

Snippets have become so useless I use a plugin to remove them.

What is ridiculous is, when, say, Stack Overflow has a good answer, it is a few lines down or on the next page in the search results, but some page-mill SEO site is in snippets up top with a completely wrong or naively pathetic partially correct answer. It is so annoying it has lowered my opinion on Google a lot in recent times.

[anyonecancode]

> I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI, especially the info snippets that appear at the top of Google's SERPs.

Yes, so would I. And I also double check things like Google Maps -- a tool I find very helpful but don't trust blindly. But... do most people think to take a close look at Google Maps to make sure it makes sense, and trust their own judgement if they disagree with the map? Will most people fact check confident LLM outputs?

[nicbou]

The content I write is often half-assedly plagiarised by copywriters or incorrectly interpreted by lazy journalists. This is just an automated version of it. They can use my hard work for their own profit at an unprecedented pace, while still remaining factually incorrect.

[brookst]

Disagree. I think this is akin to Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, which relied on the insight that it is impossible to build infallible systems, so you design failure and recovery in.

Existing Google searches are polluted with false information, and Google’s has been losing that battle. It’s probably not even possible to win.

So rather than saying search engines should always be perfectly accurate and errors are catastrophic, we should accept that search engines are, and have always been imperfect, and need to give us enough info to validate facts for queries important enough to merit it.

[fortyseven]

Ever since Google started adding those quick answer boxes at the top of search results I've had the double check everything they say. They're quite often incorrect. I mean I know that, but this grandma? They've all been conditioned to trust Google.

[kleiba]

Frankly, I quite often fact check results I get from simple google queries.

But I do agree that adding another level of fake news generation is a solution in desperate need of a problem.

[CamperBob2]

As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results.

And this stance seriously hasn't bitten you in your life or career to date?

[Baeocystin]

> I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results.

Genuine, honest question: How did you come to the belief that search engines are reliable sources of truth?

I completely agree that search engines provide a valuable service. But in my own work, I find them to very often point to inaccurate information, sometimes greatly so. I don't think this is terribly surprising, given Sturgeon's law, but still.

[kelseyfrog]

I can see how someone could extrapolate Google's goal of indexing knowledge(JTB) into being a reliable source of truth. It's simply a matter of taking them at their word on the J and T parts. The B is up to the user.

Google's branding frames itself as the expert in the novice-expert problem. The vast number of users implicitly take on the role of the novice by virtue of using the product. They've already self-identified as a novice which makes both parties complicit in the arrangement.

[primax]

When I ask ChatGPT a question, it explains it's reasoning and gives me concepts I can follow up with googling to learn more.

When I use Google for research, I get articles written for SEO to push products and often have to refine and refine and refine to get something useful, which I then can follow up by googling to learn more. With difficulty.

Honestly I don't know how much I'd use ChatGPT if I had the internet of 2016 and Google.

[mda]

Careful, It explains but both answer and explanation are sometimes completely hallucinated, it sometimes looks like a plausible answer, but actually it completely made up. And this happens way too often for me to take it seriously for now.

[primax]

It's probably got as good a success rate as many of my colleagues.

[thinknubpad]

>As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results.

This is scary to read. You always need to fact-check the results, whether they come from a search engine, an AI, or a primary source!

[cbsmith]

I don't think it's a great illustration of the risks of LLMs.

Ad content invariably gets vetted by humans. The fact that it shows up in the ad demonstrates human failures more than failures of LLMs.

[vicentwu]

So i think the ability of the search engine to say "I don't know" is very important, and most of current chatgpt like models in the market don't have this feature.

[CatWChainsaw]

>We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products

Fine. We need another good winter or ten before we decide we want to commit societal suicide via deepfake tsunami.

[scarface74]

You trust everything you find on search engines?

[MuffinFlavored]

Why can't an LLM fact check itself somehow/someway?