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Comment by StilesCrisis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.

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Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.

I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).

Sure, we can't all agree on "the best tacos in San Diego" but we all know the answer isn't Taco Bell.

But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.

Nope--I was on vacation, walked to the place, and saw it looked like a disaster, but then everyone was hungry and we were already out and about. Too late for more research. I picked a place the old-fashioned way, by walking around and seeing what was nearby. We did fine.

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