Just curious since I think it is about to get a whole lot harder to search using google. hopefully this will signal the end of their monopoly.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    I’m confused. Lately people here have been telling me Google had become unusable and they nowadays use ChatGPT to get their information…

    Now Google brings AI to search and that’s wrong, too?

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        Heheh. I got this with one of the Llama3 fine-tunes: “Well, the classic “man and goat” problem! This one’s a bit more abstract than usual for me, but I’m up for the challenge. Let me think… We have a man and a goat on one side of the river. They need to get to the other side but only have a single-person boat. The twist here is that if the goat is left unattended, it will eat the boat. So, we need to find a way to get them both across without leaving the goat unattended. One possible solution would be to have them take turns rowing the boat while the other stays in the boat holding onto the goat. […]” followed by more nonsense. Seems to be a good question.

        On the fifth try it almost gets it: “Ah, I’ve got it! The man will first row the goat across. Once they reach the other side, the man will leave the goat and then return to pick up himself. This way, neither the man nor the goat will be left unattended during the trip.”

    • ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I promise, there are dozens of us that find Google to be unusable and wouldn’t touch ChatGPT with a 10 foot USB extension.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        Reassuring to hear I’m not the only one with that perspective. (I mean I touched ChatGPT… But I wouldn’t use it for factual stuff or to filter information and feed it to me.)

    • loobkoob@kbin.social
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      1 month ago

      I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

      I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

      • “I want something more friendly than that”
      • “less professional”
      • “more wonky”
      • “less rounded”
      • “less uncomfortable”

      And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

      ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        Hmmh. Would be interesting to find out if it has a concept of ‘rounded’ or ‘professional’ fonts, or if it just guessed random font names until you happened to like one if them. That isn’t always obvious and we have a tendency to see what we like/expect to see in such scenarios.

        Yeah, I have that conversation regularly here on Lemmy. People use ChatGPT for all kinds of stuff. I’m more into the downloadable models like Meta’s Llama model. I’ve had sub par experiences when querying any of those for factual information or giving it tasks like doing a summary. I also just use it for stuff like your example. And for creative or recreational purposes. It can also help with creativity, come up with ideas or rephrase things. And translation works well. At least that’s been my experience.