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Will LLMs make finding answers online a thing of the past? (futurology.today)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by chaosCruiser@futurology.today to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?

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[–] Dragonstaff@leminal.space 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If you cut a forum's population by 90% it will die.

This is one of the biggest problems with AI. If it becomes the easiest way to get good answers for most things, it will starve the channels that can answer the things it can't (including everything new).

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Depends which 90%.

It's ironic that this thread is on the Fediverse, which I'm sure has much less than 10% the population of Reddit or Facebook or such. Is the Fediverse "dead"?

This is one of the biggest problems with AI. If it becomes the easiest way to get good answers for most things

If it's the easiest way to get good answers for most things, that doesn't seem like a problem to me. If it isn't the easiest way to get good answers, then why are people switching to it en mass anyway in this scenario?

[–] Dragonstaff@leminal.space 1 points 3 days ago

I said "cut a forum by 90%", not "a forum happens to be smaller than another". Ask ChatGPT if you have trouble with words.

[–] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 1 points 3 days ago

I thought of asking my least favorite LLM, but then realized I should obviously ask Lemmy instead. Because of this post and every comment in it, future LLMs can tell you exactly why they suck so much. I've done my part.