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.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
1001 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
76132 readers
2727 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
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.
asymptomatic long-COVID
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 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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Will cut the AI results out of your google searches by switching the browser's default to the web api..
I cannot tell you how much I love it.
Or better yet, ditch Google altogether.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I would like to say Google is still better at finding search results with more than one word. For example, if somebody searches "santa claus porn" then DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will probably return images of porn or images of santa claus instead of images of santa claus porn.
However that is no longer true either, because google search continues to get worse all the time. So it's like there isn't any good search engines anymore.
load more comments
(5 replies)
because people are just reading AI summarized explanation of your searches, many of them are derived from blogs and they cant be verified from an official source.
Or the ai search just rips off Wikipedia.
Maybe the humans are going outside and the library?
Oh I hope not.
I do not want us to return to the days of people getting limited information from outdated books from a state ran facility.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yeah switching search links will help but it’s a band-aid. AI has stolen literally everyone’s work without any attempt at consent or remuneration and the reason is now your search is 100 times faster, comes back with exactly something you can copy & paste and you never have to dig through links or bat away confirmation boxes to find out it doesn’t have what you need.
It’s straight up smash-n-grab. And it’s going to work. Just like everybody and their grandma gave up all their personal information to facebook so will your searches be done through AI.
The answer is to regulate the bejesus out of AI and ensure they haven’t stolen anything. That answer was rendered moot by electing trump.
I don’t know about you, but my results have been wrong or outdated at least a quarter of the time. If you flip two coins and both are heads, your information is outright useless. What’s the point in looking something up to maybe find the right answer? We’re entering a new dark age, and I hate it.
load more comments
(8 replies)
It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don't need more info than that summary, they don't click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn't be able to exist without the source material that it's now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Oh I didn't mean change the current setup. Create a standalone tool that better uses the wiki framework so people can access it in a different way, that's all.
I've been meaning to donate to those guys.
I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can't be cheap to keep that stuff online.
