Users on Meta are reporting issues with the AI-assisted “Discobot discoveries” search feature, which is generating non-Meta links and hallucinating URLs. Lilly initiated the discussion after receiving a broken link to an external forum instead of a relevant Meta topic regarding “slow mode.” Moin identified that the AI was incorrectly replacing the forum address in the string, a theory Lilly confirmed. Bruce5051 suggested this behavior might be an AI hallucination. sam confirmed the issue is indeed a hallucination and noted that fixing it is complicated due to the streaming nature of the implementation; sam also questioned whether AI discoveries should be enabled on Meta at all, suggesting ask.discourse.com as a better alternative. ondre j corroborated the bug, sharing an instance where Discobot generated a link to a non-existent category path, though ondre j acknowledged the feature’s convenience when functioning correctly. Finally, Canapin posted a screenshot of a humorous hallucination where the bot claimed to be highly competent, highlighting the unpredictable nature of the current AI output.
How does the AI assisted search work here on Meta? I am not understanding why I get non-Meta links in the Discobot result. I wanted to read more info about “slow mode” and the link given goes to a OOPS page on another Discourse forum at https://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/t/what-is-slow-mode/236611.
I know I could use advanced search to narrow the results, but why does this external link even show up? I would expect the search result to only be topics on Meta, or is this not a correct assumption?
Thanks for raising this, it is a hallucination. We could possibly amend the implementation to sweep through all the links discoveries gives, but it is a bit complicated given the streaming nature.
Honestly I am not sure we should have ai discoveries enabled here, ask.discourse.com is a better tool anyway for the job.
Although I do occasionally use ask.discourse.com, Its convenient to see Discobot’s discoveries (when they aren’t hallucinating) as they are right next to where you are searching.
