(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
I was taught in high school, and this was when Wikipedia was gaining ground, that you are to take every resource you find with caution. Because you will find levels of inconsistency. The idea is to create a consistent, more realistically leaning and accurate finding to the best of your ability.
you can use ai but require that it gives you references for where it got its answers.
If your talking about true research, has AI actually changed much yet. Go to a research library and use their professional search tools and people. Then read.
I don’t use them regularly, but I agree. Actual research involving peer-reviewed journals has nothing to do with AI.
EBSCOhost, PNAS, JStore, etc., all continue to exist outside the realm of AI, and I don’t really consider anything to be “research” outside of this realm.
Wikipedia has citations. Check out the links at the bottom as well as inline citations.
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.
I love your rules. sums it up nicely.
The pace at replacing books at libraries is so painfully slow you stand a good chance to find an environment that’s nearly free of LLM influence at your local one.
I have switched from Google to Kagi. I also confront what I have just ready with what I already knows and when something is wrong, I dig deeper. As somebody mentioned earlier, go along the citations string.
Truthfully, I just research the ol’ fashioned way in conjunction with asking AI questions. Google AI is great because it provides its sources with its responses. AI is a tool just like any search engine is, the truth lies somewhere in there but you need to sort of turn every stone.
I hope you get good responses outside of using AI. Personally I became so frustrated with how useless search engines have become that I caved and started using deepseek to search for sources. I use it like I would use a search engine, but can be more descriptive about what sort of source I’m looking for.
I also more frequently use the search option of different websites and news outlets from which I know they will cover certain topics well.
