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Hallucinating sources (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-all-bad-at-citing-news.php

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[–] 25 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Yes, having tested this myself it is absolutely correct. Hell, even when it finds something, it's usually a secondary or tertiary source that's nearly unusable-- or even one of those "we did our own research and vaccines cause autism" type sources. It's awful and idiots seem to think otherwise.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You shouldn't use them to keep up with the news. They make that option available because it's wanted, but they shouldn't.

    It should only be used to research older data from its original dataset, perhaps adding to it a bit with newer knowledge if you're a specialist in the field.

    When you ask the right questions in the right way, you'll get the right answers, or at least mostly - and you should always check the sources after. But it's a specialists tool at this time. And most people are not specialists.

    So this whole "Fuck AI" movement is actually pretty damn stupid. It's good to point out its flaws, try and make people aware and help guide it better into the future.

    But it's actually useful, and not going away. You're just using it wrong, and as the tech progresses, ways to use it wrong will decrease. You can't stop progress, humanity will always come with new things, evolution is designed that way.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Well, no, because what I'm referring to isn't even news, it's research. I'm an adjunct professor and trying to get old articles doesn't even work, even when they're readily available publicly. The linked article here is referencing citations and it doesn't get more citation-y than that. It doesn't change that when you ask differently, either, because LLMs aren't good at that even if tech bros want it to be.

    Now, the information itself could be valid, and in basics it usually is. I was at least able to use it to get myself some basic ideas on a subject before ultimately having to browse abstracts for what I need. Still, you need the source of you're doing anything serious and the best I've got from AI are just authors prevalent in the field which at least is useful for my own database searches.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I understand your experience and have had it myself. It's also highly dependent on the model you use. The most recent ChatGPT4.5 for instance, is pretty good at providing citations. The tech is being developed fast.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I don't doubt that it'll get better, although with the black box nature of these types of models, I'm not sure if it'll ever reach perfection. I understand neural networks, it's not exactly something you can flip the hood of and take a look at what's giving you weird results.

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