cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/24994013
CJR study shows AI search services misinform users and ignore publisher exclusion requests.
Who could have seen this coming? Definitely not the critics of LLM hyperscalers.
Move fast and break things, brah!
Training AI with internet content was always going to fail, as at least 60% of users online are trolls. It’s even dumber than expecting you can have a child from anal sex.
Well, that’s less bad than 100% SEO optimized garbage with LLM generated spam stories around a few Amazon links.
Exactly. I would like to know the baseline.
I searched for pictures of Uranus recently. Google gave me pictures of Jupiter and then the ai description on top chided me telling me that what was shown were pictures of Jupiter, not Uranus. 20 years ago it would have just worked.
The same technology Elon Musk wants to use to process your taxes everyone!
The same technology the billionaire class wants I use to eliminate payroll entirely
That guy is a moron.
But AI assistance in taxes is also being introduced where I live (Spain which is currently being government by a coalition of socialist parties).
Still not deployed so I couldn’t say how it will work. But preliminary info seems promising. They are going to use a publicly trained AI project that has already being released.
The thing is that I don’t think that precisely that is a Musk idea. It’s something that have been probably been talked about various tax agencies in the world in the latest years. The probably is just parroting the idea and giving them project to one of his billionaire friends.
Fixing all the shit AI breaks is going to create a lot of jobs
It’s strongly dependent on how you use it. Personally, I started out as a skeptic but by now I’m quite won over by LLM-aided search. For example, I was recently looking for an academic that had published some result I could describe in rough terms, but whose name and affiliation I was drawing a blank on. Several regular web searches yielded nothing, but Deepseek’s web search gave the result first try.
(Though, Google’s own AI search is strangely bad compared to others, so I don’t use that.)
The flip side is that for a lot of routine info that I previously used Google to find, like getting a quick and basic recipe for apple pie crust, the normal search results are now enshittified by ad-optimized slop. So in many cases I find it better to use a non-web-search LLM instead. If it matters, I always have the option of verifying the LLM’s output with a manual search.
From the article…
Surprisingly, premium paid versions of these AI search tools fared even worse in certain respects. Perplexity Pro ($20/month) and Grok 3’s premium service ($40/month) confidently delivered incorrect responses more often than their free counterparts.
Though these premium models correctly answered a higher number of prompts, their reluctance to decline uncertain responses drove higher overall error rates.
