What do we think about the new DDG AI Chat feature?

BrikoX , 1 month ago

Useless. Unless you are dumb enough to trust the result without verifying it yourself. And if you do verify it, at that point you spend more time than just doing a regular search.

EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted , 1 month ago

I think that's a little unfair: not everyone has the know-how to verify, and not everyone who can has the know-how to do original research on every potential topic they want to learn about.

If we all went by your logic here, none of us would put any stock in books, essays, encyclopedias, nothing.

Yes, comprehending what you read is important, but expecting everyone to original research on everything they want to learn is just not practical.

AI can be a valuable tool, in addition to critical thinking skills, if used properly.

BrikoX , 1 month ago

You are missing the point. You don't have to become a subject expert to verify the information. Not all sources are the same, some are incorrect on purpose, some are incorrect due to lax standards. As a thinking human being, you can decide to trust one source over the other. But LLMs sees all the information they are trained on as 100% correct. So it can generate factually incorrect information while believing what it provided you are 100% factually correct.

Using LLMs as a shortcut to find something is like playing a Russian roulette, you might get correct information 5 out of 6 times, but that one time is guaranteed to be incorrect.