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The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
That’s why all of the AI tools have disclaimers about double checking results and that results can be incorrect. That’s the liability waiver.
My favorite part about that is, if we have to fact-check its answers with a secondary source, why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?
Not that the people making this stuff nor the people who believe them in blindly trusting its answers think of that, of course.
Because they went ahead and fucked up search first to take care of that.
There’s definitely still plenty of utility here. Most technical people agree that they’re generally just very good at googling things but what if you don’t know what to search for? An AI can take your poorly worded question, make some kind of sense of it and spit something out.
Whereas anyone who knows how and what to Google will probably find the right answer faster. So it at least levels the playing field a bit.
Maybe.