Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys’ thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)

I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of my find those threads and comments lol

I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don’t know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can’t replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the “best” way to find information, but I don’t know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)

I don’t know much about this topic, but I’m curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.

EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I’m not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can’t really continue everyone’s responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I’ll try to think of some follow up questions :)

  • CanOpener@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    1 year ago

    AI generated search is a huge improvement over what we had before. Before, when you searched a question or topic that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page or easy answer, you get a ton of SEO spam. Stack Overflow is still a great resource for programming, but for most general knowledge, AI generated is so much more useful.

    I’ve been using Brave Search and the AI summarizer is pretty good, and I get to avoid loading shitty websites. For specific questions that aren’t easy for search engines to answer, I really like how ChatGPT is conversational and lets you ask followup questions. Another thing I’ve been using is perplexity.ai, it can actually search the internet and cite sources.

    Overall, AI has been a big help to me, and lets me avoid going to other websites which are usually just awful now. Most websites are full of ads, trackers, cookie notices, “Checking your connection”, I’m done with dealing with that. Search engines are there when I forget the domain for a service or link to a GitHub project.