As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
No. It hallucinates all the time.
Sure does, but somehow many of the answers still work well enough. In many contexts, the hallucinations are only speed bumps, not show stopping disasters.
It told people to put glue in their pizza to make the dough chewy. It’s pretty fucking awful.
Copilot wrote me some code that totally does not work. I pointed out the bug and told it exactly how to fix the problem. It said it fixed it and gave me the exact same buggy trash code again. Yes, it can be pretty awful. LLMs fail in some totally absurd and unexpected ways. On the other hand, it knows the documentation of every function, but somehow still fails at some trivial tasks. It’s just bizarre.
It does this because it inherently hallucinates. It’s just an analytical letter guesser that sounds human because it amalgamates and predicts the next word. It’s just gotten so much input that it can sound human. But it has no concept of right and wrong. Even when you tell it that it’s wrong. It doesn’t understand anything. That’s why it sucks. And that’s why it will always suck. It will not replace search because it makes shit up. I use it for coding here and there as well and it’s just making up functions that don’t exist or attributes functions to packages that aren’t real.
Maybe in the sense that the Internet may become so inundated with AI garbage that the only way to get factual information is by actually reading a book or finding a real person to ask, face to face.
My 70 year old boss and his 50 year old business partner just today generated a set of instructions for scanning to a thumb drive on a specific model of printer.
They obviously missed the “AI Generated” tag on the Google search and couldn’t figure out why the instructions cited the exact model but told them to press buttons and navigate menus that didn’t exist.
These are average people and they didn’t realize that they were even using ai much less how unreliable it can be.
I think there’s going to be a place for forums to discuss niche problems for as long as ai just means advanced LLM and not actual intelligence.
When diagnosing software related tech problems with proper instructions, there’s always the risk of finding outdated tips. You may be advised to press buttons that no longer exist in the version you’re currently using.
With hardware though, that’s unlikely to happen, as long as the model numbers match. However, when relying on AI generated instructions, anything is possible.
Not so simple with hardware also. Although less frequent, hardware also has variants, the nuances of which are easily missed by LLMs
