[coldpie]

I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the street to the library, and checked out a goddamn book.

I was already getting disillusioned with the Internet as a learning resource during the SEO spam era, but the AI era has completely destroyed it.

[augustk]

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

[coldpie]

I checked! Copyright 2013. Phew.

[TheOtherHobbes]

For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait.

Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)

[coldpie]

No way in hell I'm trusting AI for something that could lose me a finger.

[xantronix]

The thing with LLMs is that it is very, very easy to adjust the weights across the entire model to sway responses one way or another. Previously, in the hypothetical case one wanted to rewrite history, it would be a much more involved endeavour of curation; fabrication of original sources would be difficult to do at scale. But now it's trivial for a provider to inject a preamble to the prompt to not only hide results that do not fit the narrative of those legislating in the model providers' favour, but to distort the results.

Obviously none of that is happening in the current moment, and I grant that cake recipes would be low stakes, but I would rather take the tradeoff of trawling through a little bit of slop to get that same information than acclimate myself to a workflow that could be abused by providers in more high-stakes situations down the line.

But that's just me, and I realise this is not a particularly popular take, but it should nonetheless be illustrative for why "just ask the LLM" might not be the best of ideas long term.