Australian users of Bluesky and Mastodon were surprised yesterday to find Bing was informing them that the country they were in didn't actually exist.
  • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
    285·
    7 months ago

    Search engines don’t make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.

    • BreakDecks@lemmy.mlEnglish
      32·
      7 months ago

      I wish search engines “just delivered search results”. Unfortunately, they now directly and confidently answer questions with complete nonsense.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
        41·
        7 months ago

        The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.

        My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.

        • HorseWithNoName@lemm.eeEnglish
          71·
          7 months ago

          Where the info comes from doesn’t exactly change that it’s a problem.

          You can talk about media literacy, but why even have the thing exist if it can’t provide correct answers. That’s its only reason for existing.

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
            33·
            7 months ago

            You seem to be one of the very people I’m complaining about. The point of a search engine absolutely is not to spoon feed you correct answers. It’s to find information on the internet that’s relevant to a topic. There’s lots of wrong information on the internet and it’s not a search engine’s job to decide for you what’s right and what’s wrong.

            • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
              5·
              7 months ago

              Nobody is saying otherwise. The problem being discussed here is that search engines present themselves as “deciding what’s right and wrong” and present themselves as “spoon feeding correct answers”. If we really want to improve media literacy, we can begin by advocating for our search tools to not misrepresent the presentation of their data.

    • Rinox@feddit.itEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Yeah, but it’s changing. Search Engines today don’t just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it’s becoming a lot more developed.

      With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it’s not just showing you a list of sources, but it’s answering you directly, making claims, stating “facts” etc. You can easily forget it’s just a search engine, can’t fault people for this.

  • hltdev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    7 months ago

    does anyone actually ever use Bing, when not either tricked/manipulated into using it or under some sort of bribe/incentive via ms rewards ?..

    • Tanoh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      7 months ago

      I got super tired of google a few months ago. “Ah, you searched for these terms. But I am going to ignore that and instead show you results for these diffetent ones, because fu.”

      So I started using bing instead, I wouldn’t say it is worse. Just differently bad. Some search things are much worse, some are much better.

      Quite annoying how they keep pushing for “AI” all the time though, so might go back to google soon anyway.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Just so you know - it’s nowhere near as good as the “real” gpt-4. Maybe try paying for a month and see how it compares.

      • PinkPanther@sh.itjust.works
        English
        5·
        7 months ago

        Huh. I had no idea! And I use DDG… But I feel like all search engines are shit these days. 50% of the hits are autogenerated translations with AI creating false .[country] domain (I’m in Denmark) which are just advertisements. I miss the old days of search engines. Fuck, even Alta Vista gave more right answers back in the Netscape days!

    • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.oneEnglish
      12·
      7 months ago

      I will admit that I used it for years for the rewards, and it worked well for me. Once I started using a VPN though, it decided I could only redeem my rewards in Canada (I live in the US). I could have probably fixed it, but it caused me to have one of those “what am I doing anyway” moments and switch to using a SearXNG instance instead.

    • Vilian@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      you can search anonynous in bing, that’s why Ecosia and DDG use it backend

    • Fades@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      7 months ago

      Welcome to the states, friend! You picked one hell of a time to join

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      61·
      7 months ago

      The article isn’t even about AI. This is just default Bing search. The AI actually does know about Australia.

      It’s rather like a wild back how Google search said that there were no French military victories in history. It’s just bad data collection, nothing to do with AI