As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
No. It hallucinates all the time.
Yes, but search engines will serve you LLM generated slop instead of search results, and sites like Stack Overflow will die due to lack of visitors, so the internet will become a reddit-like useless LLM ridden hellscape completely devoid of any human users, and we’ll have to go back to our grandparents’ old dusty paper encyclopedias.
Eventually, in a decade or two, once the bubble has burst and google, meta, and all those bastards have starved each other to death, we might be able to start rebuilding a new internet, probably reinventing usenet over ad-hoc decentralised wifi networks, but we won’t get far, we’ll die in the global warming wars before we get it to any significant size.
At least some bastards will have made billions out of the scam, though, so there’s that, I suppose. 🤷♂️
Sure does, but somehow many of the answers still work well enough. In many contexts, the hallucinations are only speed bumps, not show stopping disasters.
It told people to put glue in their pizza to make the dough chewy. It’s pretty fucking awful.
Copilot wrote me some code that totally does not work. I pointed out the bug and told it exactly how to fix the problem. It said it fixed it and gave me the exact same buggy trash code again. Yes, it can be pretty awful. LLMs fail in some totally absurd and unexpected ways. On the other hand, it knows the documentation of every function, but somehow still fails at some trivial tasks. It’s just bizarre.
It does this because it inherently hallucinates. It’s just an analytical letter guesser that sounds human because it amalgamates and predicts the next word. It’s just gotten so much input that it can sound human. But it has no concept of right and wrong. Even when you tell it that it’s wrong. It doesn’t understand anything. That’s why it sucks. And that’s why it will always suck. It will not replace search because it makes shit up. I use it for coding here and there as well and it’s just making up functions that don’t exist or attributes functions to packages that aren’t real.