Fuck AI

Search didn’t used to give “output”. It used to give links to a wide variety of sources such as detailed and exact official documentation. There was nothing to “trust”.

If you search on Google, the results are an output. There's nothing AI about the term output.

You get the same output here and, as you can see, the sources are just as easily accessible as a Google search and are handled by non-LLM systems so they cannot be hallucinations.

The topic here is about hallucinating sources, my entire position is that this doesn't happen unless you're intentionally using LLMs for things that they are not good at. You can see that systems like this do not use the LLM to handle source retrieval or citation.

Now it’s all slop bullshit that needs to be double checked, a process that frankly takes just as long as finding the information youself using the old system, and even that still can’t be trusted in case it missed something.

This is true of Google too, if you're operating on the premise that you can trust Google's search results then you should know about Search Engine Optimization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization), an entire industry that exists specifically to manipulate Google's search results. If you trust Google more than AI systems built on search then you're just committing the same error.

Yes, you shouldn't trust things you read on the Internet until you've confirmed them from primary sources. This is true of Google searches or AI summarized results of Google searches.

I'm not saying that you should cite LLM output as facts, I'm saying that the argument that 'AIs hallucinate sources' isn't true of these systems which are designed to not allow LLMs to be in the workflow that retrieves and cites data.

It's like complaining that live ducks make poor pool toys... if you're using them for that, the problem isn't the ducks it's the person who has no idea what they're doing.

Yeah, if you already know where you're going then sure, add it to Dashy or make a bookmark in your browser.

But, if you're going to search for something anyway. Then why would you use regular search and skim the tiny amount of random text that gets returned with Google's results? In the same amount of time, you could dump the entire contents of the pages into an LLM's context window and have it tailor the response to your question based on the text.

You still have to actually click on some links to get to the real information, but a summary generated from the contents of the results is more likely to be relevant than the text presented in Google's results page. In both cases you still have a list of links, generated by a search engine and not AI, which are responsive to your query.

True, nuance is dead on social media. Especially in high propaganda places where people treat bad faith arguments like a virtue.

It is weird how the position is both that AI is simultaneously incapable of producing any work of any quality and also an existential threat to all human labor on the planet.

It really sounds like they have two arguments that they're smashing together and treating like one.

First, AI system do produce poor quality output a lot of the time. Much like any other technology, the first few years are not exactly an example of what is possible.

For example, the first jet aircraft could only operate for a few hours or their engines would literally melt. People are sitting here looking at these prototype jet aircraft and claiming that there will never be commercially viable jet travel. (and yet, in this same metaphor, somehow jets will also take over all forms of travel imminently).

LLMs and Image generators are not AI, they're simply the easiest and cheaptest to train, which is why you have all of these capitalist vultures jumping on these products as if they're the future.

That's really the core of the second part of the argument which is essentially: "Capitalists have too much money and have decided to gamble that money on the AI industry, resulting in unsustainable spending and growth that harms real people and communities".

By itself, this is a good argument also. People are starting to understand the sides, we're on the bottom and the people on the top who have the power often make horrible decisions in order to chase profit and the result is that regular people are being hurt by those decisions.

The red herring is that they're blaming these problems on AI instead of the billionaire humans who are actually choosing to put in these data centers and fire workers, etc. A language model or diffusion model isn't choosing to fly in natural gas generators to power datacenters and pollute communities. Elon Musk chose that.

Getting angry at AI is a useless distraction. There are human beings that are making these decisions and the ones that bear responsibility for the damages, not a few Terabytes of spicy linear algebra.