this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
1077 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
76945 readers
3032 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I eat out and lately overhearing some people in other tables talking about how they find shit with ChatGPT, and it's not a good sign.
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
I was chatting with some folks the other day and somebody was going on about how they had gotten asymptomatic long-COVID from the vaccine. When asked about her sources her response was that AI had pointed her to studies and you could viscerally feel everybody else's cringe.
The hell even is that? Asymptomatic means no symptoms. Long-COVID isn't a contagious thing, it's literally a description of the symptoms you have from having COVID and the long term effects.
God that makes my freaking blood boil.
Damn @BigBenis@lemmy.world that was a hell of a conversation you we having.
"Cool, send me the actual studies."
*crickets*
Assuming this AI shit doesn't kill us all and we make it to the conclusion that robots writing lies on websites perhaps isn't the best thing for the internet, there's gonna be a giant hole of like 10 years where you just shouldn't trust anything written online. Someone's gonna make a bespoke search engine that automatically excludes searching for anything from 2023 to 2035.
I can't really fault them for it tbh. Google has gotten so fucking bad over the last 10 years. Half of the results are just ads that don't necesarily have anything to do with your search.
Sure, use something else like Duckduckgo, but when you're already switching, why not switch to something that tends to be right 95% of the time, and where you don't need to be good at keywords, and can just write a paragraph of text and it'll figure out what you're looking for. If you're actually researching something you're bound to look at the sources anyway, instead of just what the LLM writes.
The ease of access of LLMs, and the complete and utter enshittyfication of Google is why so many people choose an LLM.
I believe DuckDuckGo is just as bad. I think they changed their search to match Google. I’m not sure if you are allowed to exclude search terms, use quotes, etc.
I had a song intermittently stuck in my head for over a decade, couldn't remember the artist, song name, or any of the lyrics. I only had the genre, language it was in, and a vague, memory-degraded description of a music video. Over the years I'd tried to find it on search engines a bunch of times to no avail, using every prompt I could think of. ChatGPT got it in one. So yeah, it's very useful for stuff like that. Was a great feeling to scratch that itch after so long. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with anything important.
LLM are good at certain things, especially involving language (unsurprisingly). They're tools. They're not the be-all-end-all like a lot of tech bros proselytize them as, but they are useful if you know their limitations
If you use them properly, they can be a valuable addition to one's search for information. The problem is that I don't think most users use them properly.