this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Absolutely.
Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for "how do I do X in software Y" on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.
If I ask the robot, I often get "no, there's no supported way to do that officially" which is the clear clean answer I can't find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying "no, I didn't mean that way, I meant this" in which case I often get either the right answer or the "no" answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.
But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. The cause of and solution to all of life's problems
So yeah, in terms of "things where AI has lived up to its potential"? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.
Oh, so you are saying that AI works around SEO and filters out the crap that google and other web searches used to filter out. Basically the sales for AI searches is that it is almost as good as web searches used to be.
Awesome, it is a mediocre and overly energy wasting approach to getting back to about 15 years ago which will be undone as soon as the websites abusing SEO also leverage AI to counteract the AI search and all that crap will be right back in the results again within a few years.
I mean yeah. I'm not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).
But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG's respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.
In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it's tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.
But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.
Why would i ask an LLM a question that i cant verify the accuracy of instead of just doing a traditional search of trusted resources? They give you the answer they think you want. Search engines don't want to crack down on SEO techniques because it will ultimately harm their business. But they can get around that by lighting a few acres of rainforest on fire, make up some random crap that sounds believable, and boost their stock price.
I'm sure that there are some niche use cases currently that can benefit from these programs, but most are just the next project for crypto grifters, and any legitimate uses are only really gonna be useful at commercial/industrial scale and won't be actually useful for the general public.
Bing Chat provides its sources.