logoalt Hacker News

wkat4242last Wednesday at 8:48 AM1 replyview on HN

I just use it for personal information, I'm not involved in any wars :) I don't base any decisions on it, for example if I buy something I don't go by just AI stuff to make a decision. I use the AI to screen reviews, things like that (generally I prefer really deep review and not glossy consumer-focused ones). Then I read the reviews that are suitable to me.

And even reading an article about those myself doesn't make me insusceptible to misinformation of course. Most of the misinformation about these wars is spread on purpose by the parties involved themselves. AI hallucination doesn't really cause that, it might exacerbate it a little bit. Information warfare is a huge thing and it has been before AI came on the scene.

Ok, as a more specific example, recently I was thinking of buying the new Xreal Air 2. I have the older one but I have 3 specific issues with it. I used AI to find references about these issues being solved. This was the case and AI confirmed that directly with references, but in further digging myself I did find that there was also a new issue introduced with that model involving blurry edges. So in the end I decided not to buy the thing. The AI didn't identify that issue (though to be fair I didn't ask it to look for any).

So yeah it's not an allknowing oracle and it makes mistakes, but it can help me shave some time off such investigations. Especially now that search engines like google are so full of clickbait crap and sifting through that shit is tedious.

In that case I used OpenWebUI with a local LLM model that speaks to my SearXNG server which in turn uses different search engines as a backend. It tends to work pretty well I have to say, though perplexity does it a little better. But I prefer self-hosting as much as I can (of course the search engine part is out of scope there).


Replies

ruszkilast Wednesday at 9:41 AM

Even if you know about and act against mis- and disinformation, it affects you, and you voluntarily increase your exposure to it. And the situation is already terrible.

I gave the example of wars, because it’s obvious, even for you, and you won’t relativize away the same way how you just did with AI misinformation, which affects you the exact same way.