Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

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> When you can check the provided source it's summarising and see that it's a satire website, I think that's materially different than ChatGPT's hallucinations from thin air.

I disagree.

The moment you accept the need to always check the source, there's no fucking point to this anymore.

If you have to check the source ... just provide the links like Google Search does. There's no point in a summary whose full original text you always have to read.

> From what I've seen, it is true that these errors stemmed from uncritically accepting satire/unreliable sources rather than hallucinations.

And so, this is why I don't think this holds up; If we consider this a failure mode of the user, the entire tool is pointless.

It's plainly obvious that the intended benefit of AI Overview is not having to read the pages of the search result. And with that intent, this is not a failure of the user.

> The moment you accept the need to always check the source, there's no fucking point to this anymore.

> If you have to check the source ... just provide the links like Google Search does. There's no point in a summary whose full original text you always have to read.

> [...] It's plainly obvious that the intended benefit of AI Overview is not having to read the pages of the search result.

I see its purpose as similar to the text snippets and "highlight" box that Google search has had for a while: quickly picking out information relevant to your query.

I don't think most answers actually warrant the user to verify that it came from a reliable source. If you ask "what foods end with um" or "good ideas for birthday party" you can generally just judge the answers yourself, like you would even if you already knew the answer came from Quora/reddit.

But for answers that do (which is still plenty), it makes it easier to click through and check the part of the summary you determined to be relevant, as opposed to manually parsing through pages to find that part in the first place.

> And so, this is why I don't think this holds up; If we consider this a failure mode of the user, the entire tool is pointless.

I don't consider it solely a failure on the user's part - the tool is failing here and Google claim to be making changes to improve it. I don't think lack of 100% accuracy makes automatic summaries pointless - they are still useful for surfacing information.

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