Using a large language model as a search engine was a bad idea when it was proposed by a search company. It's still a bad idea now that it's being proposed by a social media company. Fortunately, Chirag Shah and I already wrote the paper laying out all the ways in which this is a bad idea.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816

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In the popular press/general public-facing Q&A about our paper:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/29/1048439/chatbots-replace-search-engine-terrible-idea/

https://www.washington.edu/news/2022/03/14/qa-preserving-context-and-user-intent-in-the-future-of-web-search/

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And let's reflect for a moment on how they phrased their disclaimer, shall we? "Hallucinate" is a terrible word choice here, suggesting as it does that the language model has *experiences* and *perceives things*. (And on top of that, it's making light of a symptom of serious mental illness.)

Likewise "LLMs are often Confident". No, they're not. That would require subjective emotion.

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I went digging in the paper to see if they cite #StochasticParrots or Bender & Koller 2020 or Shah & Bender 2022. That is, did they read about why this is misguided and just press ahead anyway? Apparently not.

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They do cite Blodgett et al 2020 (fabulous paper!)

https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.485/

But in the strangest possible way. Are they reflecting on the possible harms their technology might engender? No, of course not. They're striving for TRUTH! And thus worried about "bias".

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Narrator voice: LMs have no access to "truth", or any kind of "information" beyond information about the distribution of word forms in their training data. And yet, here we are. Again. /fin (for now)

#AL #ML #MathyMath #AIhype #NLP #NLProc