AI and social media are both infamously terrible for gettin…
AI and social media are both infamously terrible for getting to the truth of something: AI because it confidently hallucinates completely ungrounded “facts,” and social media because it encouraging the formation of ideological echo chambers that are more concerned with pushing certain narratives then with getting to the truth of things. Since one of the goals of Treechat is to encourage deep conversations about Things That Matter, we built something to help. We call it Treesearch.
Replies
It works by doing a web search for whatever topic you give it, having an AI read through all the results of the web search (summarizing each article as it goes) and discarding anything that’s not relevant to the search query you gave it. Then, it it reads through all the summaries and writes a small report to answer the question you actually asked it.
This means you get the best of both worlds: since the AI is just in summary mode it doesn’t make things up — it just repeats what it saw in the search results. And while you can never entirely avoid the echo chamber-y nature of the Internet, this way you can get an overview of all the most popular echo chamber's views in one place.
You can activate it by typing something you want to know about into a new Treechat message, clicking the little magic wand near the bottom of the New Message window, selecting Treesearch, and then sending your message.
After you hit Post you’ll see a little window pop up inside the message that’ll keep you up to date on Treesearch’s progress:
After a bit Treesearch will write a summary of everything it learned and embed it into the message that you started the search from. But we don’t want you to take the AI’s word for things! Treesearch is fully transparent: if you scroll down from your message you’ll see that it appended two new messages to your thread: one called ‘search results’ and a second called ‘search results with summaries’.
Nested inside each of these threads you’ll see each article the AI read through and the summary it generated for each one. So while the AI conveniently sums everything up for you in one place, there’s a full audit trail of everything the AI did so you can look it over and make sure that the AI’s summaries (and conclusions!) are accurate.
It's pretty handy for settling impromptu debates that you might be taking part in on Treechat, or just to get a quick overview of a topic. And it was a lot of fun to build too!
!quoted by metamitya
[[learn treesearch]]
[[learn treechat]] treesearch