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Comment by jaredwiener | Hacker News Reader

Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this --

for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?

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I've been taking a look at my own news consumption patterns and how they've changed. One thing I noticed is previously, news was going to a paper / news site and seeing what's "new". Lately I more and more find myself first getting a glimpse of the topic from other sources (e.g. Tiktok) first, and then going to a new site to either get more details or confirm (since it's hard to tell now if a piece of content is reliable or not).

So basically news sites for me is now less about finding out new information, but rather as a secondary source to get more details or a more "professional" account of something.

Generally, if I'm manually searching for news, it's either to get more information about something I heard from someone (searching by the event), or to see if news has been published about something nearby (searching by region).

I ask two types of questions:

1. Factual updates to an ongoing or recent story.

2. Analysis, e.g. "What were the economic effects of Brexit."

Without AI, I would try to read multiple opinions from different sides. But its hard for me to always know which experts to trust?

AI will present both sides, but even when AI is not hallucinating, there is still the issue of "are the experts that the AI is sourcing reliable?"

Do you trust an ai run by a shady company but not an attributable human editor.

Yes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives. Therefore it's much harder to manipulate. A corporation which represents many shareholders' interest has its own reputation on the line, which would be seriously damaged if they were caught doing anything like you suggest.

But this can only be understood within the context of the white genocide currently happening in South Africa. Some are saying it's not real, but there have been documented attacks on farms and chants of "kill the boer".

> Yes, the AI is trained on a vast quantity of data therefore it is less likely to be manipulated vs a single editor that may have ulterior motives.

Gemini was caught stuffing prompts with "custom" keywords on certain requests, so there is still an editor between you and the AI.

Read my whole comment :)

I see what you did there :)

I think you have an outdated understanding of AI workflow. They generally cite their sources, which you should check, just like regular search.

The source is not what’s convincing you, it’s the way the ai is presenting you the information. The source just confirms what you’re already thinking at that point (what the ai has just presented to you). You’re still trusting the ai.

That may be true of the average user, but you have no way of knowing it's true of the person you replied to. It's 100% possible to check the sources properly, and form your beliefs accordingly, if you want to.

We’re so cooked, all the thinking outsourced to LLMs.

Sometimes I look for a specific old article. Search is completely useless for this since it usually ignores what I'm searching for to show me more about whatever is recent.

Updates on a specific topic, region, company, or ongoing story.

I “search” (using this word liberally here) by using a newsreader and adding sources to it over time that I find to have a high signal (whether I agree with them or not). This way new things come to me without having to explicitly look for them, often before others have heard about it, usually from several different angles. If I have to explicitly go search for something the results are usually low signal chum :(

I would assume a lot of what is losing views on news sites are the articles designed to capture "what time is the super bowl" type searches. The article features the question in the title or standfirst, the answer comes after 3 paragraphs of low value information about the super bowl.

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