(Research as in finding info, not creating it)

I feel like it’s so much harder to find the right places to get info from when so much of the web has been enshittified by AI blog grifts & sponsors these days. I do not want my only source to be a Wikipedia page - that sucks & I’m always left desiring more from it! (Not to mention more controversial aspects often go un- or barely mentioned for ‘impartiality’ reasons)

Maybe it’s just a me problem & I’m not being analytical or probing enough as a lot of my former hyperfixs were fictional & facilitated partly through social media. I just really miss going down rabbitholes & failing that I’d like more empirical evidence for my perspectives as I think I’ve forgotten how I developed them in the first place

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    I use DuckDuckGo. And I have a good example: I asked it what the birthdays of the KPop Demon Hunters girls are. (I have an “anime birthdays” calendar on my computer. It’s cool to see who has a birthday, even if it doesn’t really mean much. And I wanted to add the HUNTR/X girls (and maybe Jinu). Duck.ai happily told me that while the girls’ birthdays are not widely known, it still generated a table. It listed a fan site and Wikipedia as its sources. Neither had birthdays listed for the girls.

    I then found a fandom site (I know, they suck, they’re like the crotch of wikis, or at least the armpit). They listed two of the girls’ birthdays, and their source was an Instagram post by the official social media team. So as far as fictional characters’ birthdays go, that’s good enough for me. I added Rumi and Mira to my calendar. They have nothing for Zoey (ostensibly, her birthday hasn’t come around since the movie came out, which means it’s coming up soon) or Jinu (same, or they don’t care about his).

    Zeroth rule, optional: Use an AI that is private and won’t use your query to train itself (these are going to be not as good because of the hindrance).

    First rule: Use an AI that cites its sources.

    Second rule: Check its sources. If for whatever reason you must use an AI that does not list sources, you can either ask it its sources, or you can fact check them manually (as I ended up doing).

    Honestly it’s the same as Wikipedia, check the source. AI can be fooled. Wikipedia can be vandalised.