Benj Edwards – 3/8/2023
DuckAssist provides an AI-powered Wikipedia summary, hoping to avoid hallucinations.
Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo’s browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered by an AI model, the company admits that DuckAssist might make stuff up but hopes it will happen rarely.
Here’s how it works: If a DuckDuckGo user searches a question that can be answered by Wikipedia, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to generate a brief summary of what it finds in Wikipedia, with source links listed below. The summary appears above DuckDuckGo’s regular search results in a special box. …
… As we’ve previously covered on Ars, LLMs have a tendency to produce convincing erroneous results, which AI researchers call “hallucinations” as a term of art in the AI field. Hallucinations can be hard to spot unless you know the material being referenced, and they come about partially because GPT-style LLMs from OpenAI do not distinguish between fact and fiction in their datasets. Additionally, the models can make false inferences based on data that is otherwise accurate. …
