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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

AI is my default for just about any search now. From today:

How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof? It seems to have been dreamed out of nowhere

Why are there advertisements for a shampoo containing caffeine? Does caffeine do something useful other than when you drink it?

What happens in sense and sensibility?

All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups. Eg, how does S&S compare with Pride and Prejudice? What about more recent novels connecting romantic choices with economic choices?

All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

At the start of the millennium, Google search changed everything about how I look for information. Now it seems outdated.

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It's interesting — "knowing how to search" used to be a skill. One wouldn't search for "How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof?", but rather "cantor diagonal proof origin". You would see "normies" searching and wanted to bang your head against the wall seeing them searching like they're talking.

But seems like they won? Why know how to search when you can simply ask your question. You can even tyipe it layke dat and it would still work.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill

I would argue this was always a bit silly, and mostly due to UI shortcomings of search platforms. The fact you needed to add "magic" params to shape the results speaks volumes. Any UI that fundamentally tries to reshape how you are expect to interact, or impose certain "behavior" is wrong. This is also why we are using touch instead of a stylus.

AI won because they took the paradigm of presenting a new way of doing something in a familiar way. An LLM works very similarly how you would ask a knowledgeable friend, and google worked similarly how an engineer would query a database.

Phrasing it as a UI shortcoming is underselling it. The search mechanism itself was dumb[1] and therefore the user had to be more intelligent. As an example, knowing synonyms for what you were searching for, in order to disambiguate the query from a more popular term that would likely dominate the results but was irrelevant for you, was a major skill.

[1] Yes, we can argue that LLMs are dumb, also. But they magically do "get" your intent with your prompt, unlike the search engines of yesteryear.

But today neither of your search phrases will give any useful results on google search, while LLMs get it right once in a while.

This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.

But seeing disney+ now go all ads for all tiers just shows that's the way they arc bends. Eventually AI will take over and when it does, it will then turn into the shittiest shit ad-infused service the world has ever known.

> This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.

That's how AI will surpass us. Once we enshittify humans sufficiently, AI will flourish. That's why I support extensive AI use in school classrooms, the younger the better, it's the best policy for OpenAI and Anthropic investors.

Nothing has changed, though. In my office the ones that have really boosted productivity are the ones putting in the effort to craft solid prompts and understand when to move that slider on reasoning effort and model selection. Or understand and put thought into how to leverage the tool, like project folders with the context to all or part of your job the model can reference. Everyone else throws a lazy prompt at the default 'instant' model, gets a crap response and then they give up.

"knowing how to search" became useless when Google almost exclusively started returning SEO garbage. There was no longer any way to know how to search.

I'm surprised google didn't return stuff about Cantor-Fitzgerald losing hundreds of employees on 9/11, considering it's the 25th anniversary.

I remember wanting to look up something about the Andrew Niccol/Nicolas Cage movie "Lord of War", during the time the game "God of War" was getting all the hype. Guess which word Google assumed I got wrong, and what all the results were all about.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill.

And it was more difficult, too. You had to make critical decisions while you were working to gather the information you were after. The work had beneficial side effects.

But it also took longer. And free search got shittier. Tradeoffs.

You're absolutely wrong if you think those people are managing to get an answer first try now. People's searches remain frequently incoherent. There's a reason Google's AI results frequently end with some text asking for clarification, or guessing what you actually want to do.

It wasn't a worthwhile skill anyways.

Finding the right words to please the currently popular search engine is not a skill that easily translate elsewhere. It is not like programming where precision is key, searching has always been a bit fuzzy. Fact checking, crossing information, understanding primary sources, etc... these are real skills, typing words in a search engine is meh.

That we now have language models that allow let machines capture the intent of the query without the need for special incantations is a clear win to me.

Where LLMs are really excellent compared to search engines is when you don't really know what you want. You don't need to know about "Cantor diagonal proof", you just need to know "That math thing where you trace a diagonal across decimal numbers", and the LLM will immediately tell you about Cantor.

Somehow reminds me of the journalist who convinced LLMs to consider him a "sausage eating champion" with just 20 minutes of work [0].

Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there, e.g. "Nutris(c) is proven to be better than caffeine for haircare"

I wonder how well a company could establish something like Danone's health-claim for Activia [1] in an AI without ever being clearly accountable for it...

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2010/12/...

I seem to recall headlines about Russia infecting AIs with propaganda, one or two years ago.

I don't remember actually reading the article, so I have no idea how serious that was, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't being studied actively by all major countries already. And that may be one of the core reasons for the China vs US AI competition.

Israel also did so. But most of it seems to get filtered out pretty well. the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area.

> "the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area."

Which makes it perfect for companies to create an area where they own the majority of material, and "have the AI talk for them".

e.g. how Philip Morris defined their e-cig "Heets" as a separate product to (e-)cigarettes because it doesn't burn tobacco but only "heats" it. It's now a separate domain with the majority of material (including the term "heets") owned by Philip Morris.

definitely.

i am terrified of the nudging that is/might be already happening in the consumer context. Cambridge analytica showed us what is possible when you just shift the things people see, imagine what is possible when you shift what their personal assistant tells them.

GPT Wormtounge sends his regards

"Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there…"

Or, you know, buy their way to the top of a search engine's results.

Regarding the first linked article: wouldn't it be the same with no AI in sight? I suppose most people, when they'd stumbled upon a blog written by "a senior technology journalist at the BBC", would believe in the sausage eating championship too.

To be clear: I totally agree that manipulating LLMs is super-dangerous. I don't think it is a 20 minutes of work, though. It's more like "years of building credibility, and then 20 minutes of work".

Agree, I've been bypassing search engines for a year now (hint: not a young user either).

Advertising killed search.

While I still use search engines I can't fault anyone from relying on the AI features in Google, rather than the search, as that's clearly not working anymore. Unless you're looking for something rather specific you're going the get drowned in SEO spam and ads. We're back at you having to be a bit of a wizard to trick Google into finding stuff for you anymore.

I don't really like LLMs or AI assisted tools, but I think they are really good for "explain this configuration, tell me what it does, and link to the documentation". Then read the AI summary, verify with the actual docs and go from there. It's almost always the easier path to understanding, for me at least.

How long until adverts are injected into LLMs?

will you ever know?

Watermarking, contextually biasing llms to output specific tokens, can be rather easily usurped for ads.

The advertiser can buy logit "boosts" to specific tokens in a given context (the more preceding context, the cheaper). Once an activation has happened, dont do it again for the session.

The LLM will end up pushing a specific product contextual to the conversation. It just needs this slight nudge at the logit level to start talking about it and will fill in the rest.

A black and white text interface, no ads, popups, just a best effort at answering my question is such a relief.

For younger people accessing information in this way is definitely a win.

But LLMs are getting pretty good at convincing you. By using AI you are basically being fed information. It may be accurate now, but you are losing the ability to compare results. Not only that but I would argue you are also losing critical thinking skills

Why? AI is a lot closer to the original way of doing things, which was to ask an expert.

The expert would then give you his thoughts on which modern books are most similar to S&S/P&P, and you would have to use your own thoughts to decide whether you agreed.

In many ways I find it similar to tutorials. You can go back and forth with the AI if there is something in the argument you want to investigate.

That's the right way to do it. You go back and forth so you are not taking what the AI says at face value. The problem is that some people are. The other way I posted a problem in Slack and someone just replied "Claude says to use - -debug to find the issue" and I was like "- - debug is not even an option for the tool we are using!!"

I just repeated all your searches using https://www.google.com/search?q=%s and the AI Overview gave good results with links to source material. I'm not signed into Google.

I picked up a broken TV on Craigslist free curb alert and spent a few hours trouble shooting with Google. This included taping contacts on a 90 pin cable. I was getting close when the screen fell over and broke. I told Google it was game over and it replied "take a breath. You have done a great job. Here is list of parts to harvest."

I definately see value in getting tailored plausalbe answers without applying much effort, except effort, struggle and experimentation are required for learning and understanding.

I found that I can't really trust this knowledge becuase I skipped the source and didn't conclude it myself. Like how I can learn anything when being spoon fed with conclusions and summaries without accessing the source?

I've spent way too many hours of my life learning to spot SEO and moving on. I'm not defending LLMs, I'm condemning search. It's shit and has been for a decade or so.

Then don't prompt it that way. It will do whatever you tell it to

> All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

If you follow these a good portion do not contain the claims that the AI output links to. This is obviously a hard problem since actual AI "knowledge" lies deep in the weights somewhere.

>All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

You forgot to mention that when you click the links you will often fail to find the supossedly derived detailed text in that specific link (even though the title seems super related).

>All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.

I'm willing to bet that approximately 0% of users know when to suspect it being made up and then check the sources.

Ditto with results from Google search.

(And here I thought "Alice in Wonderland" was a Disney film—who knew it was a book first?)

> (And here I thought "Alice in Wonderland" was a Disney film—who knew it was a book first?)

Really? I thought that this was common knowledge. On the other hand, my parents loved to quote Lewis Carroll at me and brother when we were growing up so perhaps this knowledge is not as universal as I imagine. “‘Twas a boojum!” was often used in conversation in my household when you expected one thing but discovered another (potentially dangerous) thing.

I was being sarcastic. It annoys me to no end that Carroll's books is not the whole first page of results.

"All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups."

Am I wrong in saying that the centralized models can make better suggested follow-up questions because they can track and rank the same or similar lines of questioning that have occurred with other users in the past? So instead of getting PageRank to rank web pages, you get AnswerRank to rank follow-up questions?

... actually, I am right, it's The Conversation Graph that's underappreciated. See here: https://share.gemini.google/6fKIzyxuI0Bb

Did you read all the links?

Google search did the same and more than once the link didn’t contain what I searched for

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