I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can’t.
About a third of the time, Perplexity’s text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn’t have found the same sources that way.
Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.
Nuance and depth isn’t as popular as I’d like on or off Lemmy.
I think ddg and Google are performing worse because of AI. Pushing their AI services and the tsunami of AI slop make a search harder than SEO did and deprioritizes fixing it.
Ah, but you see, I never claimed AI isn’t useful. In fact, you can check my comment history. I’ve agreed AI is a very useful tool, I still think it shouldn’t be used for ethical, social, and personal reasons
A problem with nuance is that people want to discuss the specifics and nuances of what they care about but for the most part won’t do that on subjects for other people. So you need to tailor your responses to your audience. FWIW on Lemmy I see a lot more instances of people with specificly opposed takes where both sides have similar vote counts. So while it’s not perfect it’s better than most
I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can’t.
About a third of the time, Perplexity’s text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn’t have found the same sources that way.
Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.
Nuance and depth isn’t as popular as I’d like on or off Lemmy.
I think ddg and Google are performing worse because of AI. Pushing their AI services and the tsunami of AI slop make a search harder than SEO did and deprioritizes fixing it.
Ah, but you see, I never claimed AI isn’t useful. In fact, you can check my comment history. I’ve agreed AI is a very useful tool, I still think it shouldn’t be used for ethical, social, and personal reasons
A problem with nuance is that people want to discuss the specifics and nuances of what they care about but for the most part won’t do that on subjects for other people. So you need to tailor your responses to your audience. FWIW on Lemmy I see a lot more instances of people with specificly opposed takes where both sides have similar vote counts. So while it’s not perfect it’s better than most