this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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348
AI Search Engines Are Confidently Wrong Too Often. (www.seroundtable.com)
submitted 4 days ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A new study from Columbia Journalism Review showed that AI search engines and chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Deepseek Search, Microsoft Copilot, Grok and Google's Gemini, are just wrong, way too often.

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[–] criitz@reddthat.com 47 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

When LLMs are wrong they are only confidently wrong. They don't know any other way to be wrong.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 25 points 4 days ago

They do not know wright from wrong, they only know probability of the next word.

LLMs are a brute forcing of the immigration of intelligence. They do not think, they are not intelligent.

But I mean people today believe that 5G vaccines made the frogs gay.

[–] kubica@fedia.io 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

We only notice when they are wrong, but they can also be right just by accident.

[–] isaaclyman@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

This does seem to be exactly the problem. It is solvable, but I haven't seen any that do it. They should be able to calculate a confidence value based on number of corresponding sources, quality ranking of sources, and how much interpolation of data is being done vs. Straightforward regurgitation of facts.

[–] TaviRider@reddthat.com 4 points 3 days ago

I haven’t seen any evidence that this is solvable. You can feed in more training data, but that doesn’t mean generative AI technology is capable of using that in the way you describe.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 points 3 days ago

I've been saying this for a while. They need to train it to be able to say "I don't know". They need to add questions to the dataset without enough information to solve so that it can understand what is/isn't facts vs hallucinating