AI is untrustworthy and shouldn’t be used

I have management talking about copilot usage rates and I hear people casually refer to “what ChatGPT told them” in conversation

AI is untrustworthy and shouldn’t be used

I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can’t.

About a third of the time, Perplexity’s text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn’t have found the same sources that way.

Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.

Nuance and depth isn’t as popular as I’d like on or off Lemmy.

I think ddg and Google are performing worse because of AI. Pushing their AI services and the tsunami of AI slop make a search harder than SEO did and deprioritizes fixing it.