My wife decided to learn #Python and, with absolute deadpan seriousness, refers to curly brackets exclusively as "squirrelly brackets".
Not only do I not correct her, I have now adopted this term as canonical.
What Google should *really* do about ChatGPT.
First, let’s be clear. ChatGPT knows absolutely nothing about anything. It’s summing up everything it’s read into a sort of democratized conclusion of what it thinks people would say when asked a question. Even ignoring the fact that it will happily munge two unrelated items and make up something new, a lot of the stuff it reads on the internet (I hope this isn’t a surprise to anyone) isn’t actually *true*. And facts can’t be determined by majority vote. That’s not how reality works.
But that doesn’t mean the technology wouldn’t be useful to a search engine.
1. Determine when one site is simply copying another site with tweaks. (Google has gotten worse and worse at this...and as a result search results are polluted with garbage sites.)
2. Determine all the places a particular topic is being discussed.
3. Given an answer on a site, actually report on whether other sites agree or disagree, and what sites those are. (This is both generally useful, *and* provides transparency. It also enables you to cluster and discard bad actors.)
Note that in none of those cases did I recommend that it generate anything for the user to read. It might be doing that internally to see if two things are similar, but the output to the user should be a list of actual human generated resources. I wouldn’t even trust it for summarizing. It’s too easy to ingest a paragraph describing what people incorrectly say, and not realize those are counterfactuals. (Google’s quick answers do this far too often.) ML *sucks* at understanding context.
And of course that leads to the most useful thing the tech can do for Google. Determine when a site is using GPT-type algorithms to generate content. That’s going to be an ongoing battle right up there with spam, but it’s absolutely necessary to combat misinformation.
“In #Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment and counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
Make sure everyone understands this — It’s costing us far too much to NOT provide housing and supports to those who are homeless.
Caroline Orr Bueno
Nate Looker
Ethan J. A. Schoonover
Hourly Otters (old)
Esther Schindler
schrockg
Kee Hinckley
Nowhere Girl
Richie Holland
Brent Toderian