I asked a chatbot scenarios for AI wiping out humanity and the most believable one is where it makes humans so dependent and infantilized on it that we just eventually stop reproducing and die out.
I guess I’m a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia when I want to know stuff. I use chatGPT when I need quick information about something that’s not necessarily super critical.
It’s also much better at looking up stuff than Google. Which is amazing, because it’s pretty bad. Google has become absolute garbage.
Same but with Encyclopedia Brittanica
What?!? That’s crazy!!!
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Wikipedia, is becoming one of few places I trust the information.
How ironic that school teachers spent decades lecturing us about not trusting Wikipedia… and now, the vast majority of them seem to rely on Youtube and ChatGPT for their lesson plans. Lmao
One thing I don’t get: why the fuck LLM’s don’t use wikipedia as a source of info? Would help them coming up with less bullshit. I experimented around with some, even perplexity that searches the web and gives you links, but it always has shit sources like reddit or SEO optimized nameless news sites
Perplexity is okay with more academic topics at the least, albeit pretty shallow (usually isn’t that different to google). There might be a policy not to include encyclopedias, but it would be an improvement over SEO garbage for sure.
Yeah, I use it instead of search, as that has gone to shit years ago do to all the SEO garbage, and now it’s even worst with AI generated SEO garbage.
At least this way I get fast results, and mostly accurate on the high level. But I agree that if I tra to go deeper, it just makes up stuff based on 9 yrs old reddit posts.
I wish somebody built an AI model that prioritized trusted data, like encyclopedias, wiki, vetted publication, prestige news portals. It would be much more useful, and could put Google out of business. Unfortunately, Perplexity is not that
It’s funny that MAGA and ml tankies both think that Wikipedia is the devil.
There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.
In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with from positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.
I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.
Thank you for your service 🫡
Any chance you remember what that one edit war was about?
It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.
Wikipedia has an imperfect process, but it is open to review and you can see how the sausage is made. It isn’t perfect, but the best we have.
Luv u Wiki
MAGA and tankies are pretty much the same except MAGA votes while tankies whine.
Red hat vs red coat fascists
That instance is fucking bananas
So very much on-script though
The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. On the talk pages users will earnestly tell you that mentioning napalm can stick to objects when submerged in water constitutes “unnecessary POV”, and third-degree burns are painless because they destroy nerve tissue (don’t ask how the tissue got destroyed, and they will not be banned for this so get used to it). Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it’s not a project to create the world’s encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a “notable sandwich” is.
Ah yes, you were personally insulted and now discredit the biggest collection of knowledge the world has ever had. Fuck you, you fool.
As a Wikipedia editor I can comfirm - we regularly say that napalm sticking to objects in water is POV. I do it at least twice a week. I’ll try making a bot to do it automatically so I’ll have more time for holocaust denial.
As a fellow Wikipedia editor I have confirmed that you are in fact the intern who kept making edits directly from the Capitol without even using a VPN.
Citation needed.
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Show me. That’s a simple request.
No it doesn’t
This is a very low-quality reply. Try making more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions here on Lemmy. Thanks!
I don’t care what that is, you post too much on here. I’m blocking and supplanting you.
Supplanting?
You’ll have to use smaller words for me, boss.
Try not making shit up
growing up I got taught by teachers not trust Wiki bc of misinformation. times have changed
Nope, we all misunderstood what they meant. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it is a derivative work. However, you can use the sources provided by the Wikipedia article and use the article itself to understand the topic.
Wikipedia isn’t and was never a primary source of information, and that is by design. You don’t declare information in encyclopedias, you inventory information.
“Nope” to what exactly? you just regurgitated what I said
Wikipedia was not then what it is now. You’re spot on with all that, spot on, but in the early days it wasn’t nearly as trustworthy.
Fair enough, I’m not old enough to remember those days of Wikipedia, my memory starts in roughly 2010 wrt Wikipedia use 😅
You can check old versions of any article by clicking ‘history’. And yeah, the standards used to be pretty low.
Now in some states, you can’t trust teachers not to be giving you misinformation.
We homeschool our daughter. Saw a cool history through film course that taught with an example movie every week to grow interest… nothing in the itinerary said they’d play a video of Columbus by PragerU. They refused the refund, as it was 2 weeks in, and said it was used to foment conversation, but no other video was being offered or no questions were prepared to challenge the children. I worded my letter to call out the facts about Columbus vs the video, and the lack of accreditation of the source. I tried not to be the “lib”, but I very much got the gist that’s their opinion of me, and how they brushed me off. That fucking site is a plague on common sense, decency, and truth. Still fired up, and it was last month. We pulled her out of the course immediately after the video.
I can’t imagine homeschooling. Not that I think it’s bad but that it has to be so hard to do. And harder still to do it right.
Glad you pulled out of that course. PragerU is hot garbage and I hate how my autocorrect apparently knows PragerU and didn’t try to change it to something else.
How hard do you find it to homeschool? How many hours do you reckon it takes a day?
You’ve gotta keep in mind that in a regular school your kid is one of 20-30 for the teacher and they are lucky if they get five minutes of individual help/instruction. Everything else is just lecture, reading, and assignments.
It doesn’t have to be onerous. We homeschooled until around 3rd grade. Even so, the other kids they are in school with are academically… not stellar. My youngest (13) has a reading disability and she struggles to pass classes. She still frequently finds herself helping out other students because they are even worse off.
I’m not anti-public education, but whether it’s Covid or just republicans gutting the system, public education is in a state right now. I figure funding needs to increase by 30-50%. Kids need more resources than they are getting. And until they do, homeschooling isn’t an unreasonable option. But it’s not for everyone, of course. One parent has to work (or not) from home or odd hours.
If this is only 6 weeks ago now then you can still most likely do a credit card charge back if you paid that way
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Who would’ve thought??
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.
I’ve been asking a bunch of next-to-obvious questions about things that don’t really matter and it’s been pretty good. It still confidently lies when it gives instructions but a fair amount of time it does what I asked it for.
I’d prefer to not have it, because it’s ethically putrid. But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time i’d spend doing it manually. Plus I kind of hope using it puts them out of business. It’s not like I’d pay for it.
I refuse to believe that it’s in any way better or faster at unit and currency conversion than plain Google or DuckDuckGo. Literally type “100 EUR to USD” and you’ll get an almost instant answer. Same with units: “100 feet to meters”.
And if you’re using it, you’re helping their business. It’s as simple as that.
100%. Unit conversion is a solved problem, and it is impossible for an AI to be faster or more accurate than any of the existing converters.
I do not need an AI calculator, because I have no desire to need to double check my calculator.
Curious what and how you’re prompting. I get solid results, but I’m only asking for hard facts, nothing that could have opinion or agenda inserted. Also, I never go past the first prompt. There be dragons that way.
Niche history and mineralogy topics. Just looking for threads to tug. I found that it offered me threads but they often did not lead anywhere relevant or outright did not exist. Which is fine, but kinda removes my need for AI. If I have a general purpose question, I check certain websites. I already know how to serve myself everyday information. AI’s just not helpful for my use case.
Overall, It’s time neutral. But it raises my blood pressure when it hallucinates, and dying of a stroke is undesirable for me.
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.
I switched to Startpage, an EU-based search engine.
Yes! Startpage rocks hard. I wish Safari would let it be the default search engine (FF does with a simple plug in).
Not EU based, and not free, but I’ve been loving Kagi.
Seconding Kagi, it’s worth every penny.
Well, I’m glad. That being said, Startpage is a search engine located in the Netherlands that you can start using now. Just go to the site. Kagi is paid.
Startpage! No shit. Used to be Ixquick, and I used that for years. Great site - thank you for reminding me it’s still there. :)
For Firefox on Android (which TenBlueLinks doesn’t have listed) add a new search engine and use these settings:
Name: Google Web
Search string URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
as @Saltarello@lemmy.world learned before I did, strip the number 25 from the string above so it looks more like this:www .google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engineEDIT: There’s got to a Markdown option for disabling markdwon auto-formatting links, right?? The escape backslash seems to not be working for this specifically.EDIT II: Found a nasty hack that does the trick!
https[]()://www.example.com/search?q=%sappears as:
Lemmy also does code markup with `text`
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14Indeed, @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone, like so!:
Edit, oh is it buggy with parameters per downthread? Interesting
Thank you.
Oh thank you I’ve been looking for this
Unfortunately, it’s gonna get bad before it gets worse.
Well that’s kind of reassu… oh
Alternative for DuckDuckGo:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engine
Using backticks can help
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?qedit: How odd, the equal sign disappears
There’s a certain irony in a website that caused a decline in visitors to primary sources complaining about something new causing a decline in visitors to its tertiary sources
I mean, there’s levels to this. If I’m looking for information, having a summary rather than a highly technical primary source can be very useful. Wikipedia cites its sources, and (ideally) has summaries made by groups of people familiar with the subject and following consistent and detailed publicly available style guides. Wikipedia isn’t running ads, and is not for profit.
When an AI summarizes these primary sources, or even summarizes Wikipedia, you get none of that. AI does not reliably cite sources (ones not made for it will just generate a convincing looking response, making up sources whole cloth. Ones made to cite sources will often not actually cite the ones they used, and still can make up sources more rarely). It can’t reliably summarize things accurately, as it doesn’t understand anything, especially not terms that have different meanings depending on the technical context. There’s no group of people reviewing and revising. There’s no incredibly detailed style guide. All these AI are explicitly for profit (the amount of self hosted out there is negligible and those are much less of a problem), and almost every one of the companies running them have openly spoken about future plans to try and seamlessly weave advertisements into them. Most importantly, there’s no guarantee that what it gives you will even be true.
Why would people come? We live in an age where truth doesn’t matter.
Seems like clickbait. Wikipedia does not need actual visitors that badly.
In my case, I simply ended up buying a subscription to Brittanica, which I started using instead. I just don’t trust wikipedia in this era. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/04/30/our-new-ai-strategy-puts-wikipedias-humans-first/
If an ‘information source’ is planning to start using AI, I’m going to go with one that has some accountability.
Such a disingenuous take.
That link clearly states they have no intention of replacing human content with AI.
It goes on to say they plan to use AI for moderation detection and flagging things for human review. That’s not a problem at all.
Oh and accountable Britannica has an entire forward facing AI for users to directly get misinformed by. https://www.britannica.com/chatbot (it’s just a wrapper for ChatGPT).
Using it for “moderation” would be…not sure why they’d need to “detect” moderation.
Perhaps you’ve phrased this poorly.
Not all AI use is bad, and it sounds to me like you didn’t read that article itself. They have no desire or intention to use AI in a way that directly effects the information on the site, how it’s presented to visitors or to use it in a way that would manipulate how articles are edited.
The only potential note is translation, but translation is such a massive undertaking that by providing a means to discuss and interact between languages, the information becomes more broadly available and open to correction as needed by native speakers.
Also, Britannica does employ the use of AI within their own system as well, even providing a chatbot by which to ask questions and search for information. It is, in this way, more involved than Wikipedia’s goals.
We will use AI to…
Yeah, a bit rich for them to be complaining about a technology they’re also planning on installing and using themselves.
