Search results are useless, AI is poisoning Wikipédia. While I do have the patience to read primary sources in my field of study, it becomes a nightmare to repeat this process for every bit of information I want.
I’m almost signing up for Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t know what else to do.
You don’t really.
Skepticism is a practiced skill, rather than just “being skeptical”, you can learn how to assess credibility of a source, and develop a habit of doing so.
I quite like skeptics guide to the universe podcast. Although I admit I usually skip chunks of each episode.
Another avenue is researching about cognitive biases. We all do it.
When I hear news and I’m unsure of the validity of it, I Google and under the news section, if there are multiple articles from various different sources talking about it, I figure it’s true
The uncomfortable truth is that we lived through a very unique golden age of veracity. The photograph and later video completely revolutionized and changed the whole idea of what knowledge and verification were. Prior to indisputable photographic evidence, word and reputation carried more weight as often they were the strongest evidence towards the truth. AI has kind of us returned us to that stage, weirdly making the period of veracity we considered permanent instead a comparative blip in human history.
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For news: the Bylines network in the UK. They have a source checker for every article.
Similar to the top comment, I learned leftist political theory (mindset in their case). Once you understand what capitalism and socialism truly are, you have almost like a shield to protect you from certain propaganda. This sounds arrogant, but its genuinely been my experience
I don’t. I ignore the news to the best of my ability. I can’t be misinformed if I’m not informed in the first place.
Books?
Books aren’t an answer to this question if you need quick information you couldn’t have predicted you’d need, and therefore do not own a book about.
I just feel books are the ultimate source of knowledge. Been collecting them forever. Also books are free at the library and they have computers to search for things.
I also have offline Wikipedia from a few years ago, and an offline Reddit from a few years ago before it was poisoned with AI and bots.
Books are amazing, but i wouldn’t agree they are a source of reliable information. Yes some books have reliable information, but just because its a book doesn’t mean it can’t have misinformation or even disinformation. Books were the original source of conspiracy theories and beyond that they can’t be updated with new information.
That being said books are amazing. With a good library and a good librarian you can learn anything.
RSS ( multiple sources for current events) , Wikipedia, and forums.
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most news are from propaganda sources, look for how its being worded in the title.
And what photo they’re using. Most news outlets use unflattering pictures of the people they don’t like.
I’m a user of Brave Search and I get reliable information with every search. I wonder what kind of information you’re even looking for though. And Wikipedia is still pretty reliable for me… Maybe try Brave Search instead of Google?
I didn’t even know Brave had a search engine, is it any good? I use duckduckgo and it’s okay.
edit - you said it’s good. I wonder what others think/how it compares to DDG and the big evil one.
Brave gives higher quality search results than DDG but its not as good at niche queries. If you’re looking for something very specific then use DDG. But if your query is about a really broad, general topic then Brave will probably give you better results.
Personally, I have tried many search engines (Google, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Bing, Mojeek, Presearch etc.). And so far, it’s the best one I have used. And on top of that, it’s not Big Tech and it literally has an independent index which means it doesn’t rely on Google or Bing for it results. So I personally highly suggest it. It also has an AI overview (powered by their own AI) like Google but pretty useful unlike Google. If you don’t like it, you can disable it though.
And it also has its own AI called “Ask Brave”, which is totally up to your choices if you wanna use it or not. I’m just letting you know.
AI is poisoning Wikipédia.
Huh?
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Yeah I don’t get that. Wikipedia is a fine source.
Wikipédia is fighting an ongoing and ever increasing issue of collaborators pushing AI text into articles, which contain false information.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? Your misinformation is not my fault:
1 in 20 new Wikipédia pages contain AI-generated text: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2454256-one-in-20-new-wikipedia-pages-seem-to-be-written-with-the-help-of-ai/
Wikipédia attempts to maintain a task force to clean the articles poisoned by AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_suspected_AI-generated_texts
AI translations are poisoning non-EN Wikipédia: https://wistkey.medium.com/ai-translations-are-poisoning-wikipedia-and-putting-minority-languages-at-risk-c4539984734c
AI “contributions” are bringing up recycled information and fake sources, and the human verification often fails: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-ai-generated-content-in-wikipedia-a-tale-of-caution
But sure, keep downvoting me and ignoring the issue, geniuses.
And there’s corporations pushing agendas into primary sources. And there’s lying liars who lie for lying’s sake.
If you’re going to draw the line at “unassailable truth” then you’re doing all the work yourself.
If you’re going to draw the line at “unassailable truth” then you’re doing all the work yourself.
and since that’s virtually impossible, then perhaps one simply shouldn’t trust any news at all.
Or anything ever. The present is just a fiction made up to explain the current chemical state of your mind.
Or we could be reasonable. I guess that’s a second option.
The present is just a fiction made up to explain the current chemical state of your mind.
We have no free choice. Life has no meaning.
Wikipedia has an army of human writers that probably don’t take too kindly to AI.
It’s actually about 15 people that mostly maintain it.
[citation needed]
Anyone can make edits, but it’s mostly done by a handful of people.
This guy for example created 1/3rd of the articles.
https://youtu.be/JhNczOuhxegThat guy has made edits to a third of pages. Minor ones like making sure articles conform to the style guide.
really you don’t. you read forum posts and try to guess to what degree the information is credible.
the problem is finding those forum posts
Google doesn’t return them anymore. I have much more luck with duckduckgo when I want to find an answer to a specific question
Yeah, forum posts are becoming really useful again. A few years ago whenever someone posted a question to a forum you could often find the same snarky remark in the comments: ‘just google it’. There was even a website created to add to the snark (let me google that for you). And there was some truth to that comment. Usually you could find the answer pretty easily with a quick search.
But that’s not the case anymore. With AI slop, search engines are getting less and less helpful. Slop has polluted our search results just like plastic has polluted our oceans. It’s at the point now where search engines are almost useless for large subsets of common queries. So we are slowly returning to a pre-search engine era. In this new, post-search engine era, forum posts provide a very useful way of providing information. Long live the forum.
Use the Google flag of “before:2022” added to any search. This will limit returned results to only those captured before 2022, which is when AI slop feedback started. Obviously this doesn’t work for current events, but if the data you’re looking for doesn’t need to be recent it can be useful.
Example:
this actually did show me slightly better results, although the results were nowhere near a slam dunk.
