★ Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Generative AI Bullshit Bathwater

I suspect billions of people will be happy to receive their answers to complicated queries directly on the search results page, uninterested in where the information comes from, so long as it’s accurate enough.

But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism... See more

Google gives you Ten Blue Links, which communicates “it might be one of these - see what you think” (and turns us all into Mechanical Turks, giving Google feedback by picking the best answer). But a chat bot gives you three paragraphs of text with apparent certainty as The Answer, and footnotes, a click-through disclaimer and a ‘be careful!’ boiler... See more

Can large language models take the place of traditional search engines? For us to have confidence in them, we would need to know that they haven’t been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories—we’d need to know that the jpeg is capturing the right sections of the Web. But, even if a large language model includes only the information we want

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