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?

  • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayOPEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    That is an option, and undoubtedly some people will continue to do that. It’s just that the number of those people might go down in the future.

    Some people like forums and such much more than LLMs, so that number probably won’t go down to zero. It’s just that someone has to write that first answer, so that eventually other people might benefit from it.

    What if it’s a very new product and a new problem? Back in the old days, that would translate to the question being asked very quickly in the only place where you can do that - the forums. Nowadays, the first person to even discover the problem might not be the forum type. They might just try all the other methods first, and find nothing of value. That’s the scenario I was mainly thinking of.

      • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayOPEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        This idea about automated forum posts and answers could work. However, a human would also need to verify that the generated solution actually solves a problem. There are still some pretty big ifs and buts in this thing, but I assume it could work. I just don’t think current LLMs are quite smart enough yet. It’s a fast moving target, and new capabilities are bing added on a daily basis, so it might not take very long until we get there.