Monday, April 10, 2023

Generative #AI and search: two articles

Firstly, an article by Phil Bradley on AI and search engines, with some tips on how you can use one on the other, and how AI will be a "Google evolver":
Bradley, P. (2023) The Future of Search Is Intelligent. Computers in Libraries, 43(3). https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/apr23/Bradley--The-Future-of-Search-Is-Intelligent.shtml

Secondly, some interesting insights from:
Chiang, T. (2023, 9 February). ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg of the web. The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web. (n.b. you only get a limited number of stories free, so whether you can access all of this will depend on how many New Yorker articles you accessed previously)
Some quotes (in which I take the Google rather than the ChatGPT approach - you have to guess whether I understood the quotes or not!) "The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something."
[having identified that ChatGPT is good at generating filler "content"] "I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself."
Photo by Sheila Webber: fallen cherry blossom, April 2023

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