Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses

Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge.

r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench

To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable.

But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.

...which is sometimes incredibly hard and it might not be possible because it's such a niche topic or people might be just wrong. Just thinking about Urban Myths, Conspiracy theories etc. where even without a niche factor things may sound unbelievable but actually disproving can be effort that is out of proportion

I have seen a tremendous amount of bad advice on bikewrench.

But a lot of great advice.

I became a half decent home bike mechanic through reading it, and of course Park Tool videos.

I don't know about bikewrench but AskHistorians is a useful source of knowledge because it is strongly moderated and curated. It's not just a bunch of random assholes spouting off on topics. Top level replies are unceremoniously removed if they lack sourcing or make unsourced/unsubstantiated claims. Top level posters also try to self-correct by clearly indicating when they're making claims of fact that are disputed or have unclear evidence.

OpenAI, Google, and the other LLMs-are-smart boosters seem to think because the Internet is large it must be smart. They're applying the infinite monkey theorem[0] incorrectly.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

In general, I have trouble trusting environments that can be described as "strongly moderated and curated".

I find that environments that rely on censorship tend to foster dogma, rather than knowledge and real understanding of the topics at hand. They give an illusion of quality and trustworthiness. It's something we see happen at this site to some extent, for example.

I'd rather see ideas and information being freely expressed, and if necessary, pitted against one another, with me being the one to judge for myself the ideas/claims/positions/arguments/perspectives/etc. that are being expressed.

Your comment is orthogonal to the quality of the AskHistorians subreddit. AskHistorians' moderation tends towards curating posts following the rules rather than content. There's often competing narratives on questions where there's academic dispute of facts.

Regardless of whether you think that's the right approach to moderation, top level posts are sourced and can at least be examined. It's a marked improvement over the unsourced musings of random Redditors.

It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.

Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do

I wonder what the impact all of those erase tools are having on LLM training. The ones that replaced all of these highly upvoted comments with nonsense.

I'm pretty sure those "erase" tools are just for the front-end and reddit keeps the original stuff in the back-end. And surely the deal Google made was for the back-end source data, or probably the data that includes the original and the edit.

The LLM does a summary of web search results. It's quoting what you can see, not pretrained knowledge, afaik.

It may not be a joke. Perhaps it has confused making food for eating with directions for preparing food for menu photography and other advertising.

The Reddit post in question was definitely a joke. This is the post in response to a user asking how to make their cheese not slide off the slice:

> To get the cheese to stick I recommend mixing about 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. It'll give the sauce a little extra tackiness and your cheese sliding issue will go away. It'll also add a little unique flavor. I like Elmer's school glue, but any glue will work as long as it's non-toxic.

This matches the AI's response of suggesting 1/8 a cup of glue for additional "tackiness."