Anyone else experience this?

You run into a niche or weird issue. So you google “how to x”, “y not working on z” or “Error code: 123”; The 1st, 2nd, 3rd page are infected, probably 90% AI slop. Don’t have any luck even with the one blog post that was probably written by a human.

Now I have to go to YouTube. Look for a tutorial, 1st, 2nd, 3rd video all AI. AI voice, AI avatar, bot comments like “😍😍😍”.

Finally I reach a real video from a year or two ago that actually solved my issue. Took 4 hours when normally I could find it in 1 hour tops.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    9 小时前

    I use duck duck search for their assist which scrapes from pages that were written by humans. Sounds like google has gone down some AI inception hellhole.

  • lietuva@lemmy.world
    57·
    2 天前

    And then some bs article is like this :

    Step 1. Make sure you connected to internet

    Step 2. Make sure your drivers are updated

    Step 3. Restart your pc

    Step 4. Delete cache

    Step 5. Download some obscure tool

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ

    • AAA@feddit.org
      21·
      2 天前

      Those articles sole purpose is to get you to install the obscure tool. The unhelpfulness of the first couple steps is a feature, not a bug.

      • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
        6·
        1 天前

        Yep, that’s good ol’ human-generated SEO spam. Look up every problem someone might have, offer extremely generic advice, present paid tool as a solution.

  • early_riser@lemmy.world
    121·
    1 天前

    Part of this is Google’s and YT’s platform decaying, not just AI. Before AI, Google was infected with ads and listicles. Before any of that you had a million forum replies amounting to “Just google it!” (I am, wise guy, that’s how I ran into your post in the first place.) If not that, then it was “RTFM” (Maybe if you had a technical writer write a better manual and not have the devs write it who don’t realize there are people that don’t have the intimate knowledge of this obscure software package that they do and thus don’t bother mentioning stuff that’s ‘obvious’ to them and literally no one else.)

    And don’t get me started on the landfill that is Stack Overflow.

  • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    22·
    2 天前

    Just set the search date to before 2019, AI at that point was a plaything so there’s next-to-no AI slop results

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    182·
    2 天前

    You might want to have a look at Kagi. It’s a search engine that doesn’t have ads and actually crowd sources stats about sites being riddled with AI slop. The search is crazy-fast and the results regularly better than I’ve had with Google and DuckDuckGo.

    The catch: you pay for it. It’s not much, but in my experience it’s worth it.

    • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      121·
      2 天前

      Fuck AI as the community:

      Try this AI search tool, it’s paid for though so it sucks less

    • BougieBirdie@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      2 天前

      Is Kagi Assistant very distinct from the search?

      I’ve heard generally good things about Kagi. But all of their plans include AI and that’s something of a red flag

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        62·
        2 天前

        So I was dubious about this as well, but it turns out, it’s actually rather well thought-out.

        Each plan comes with AI support, but you don’t have to use it and it’s not enabled by default. So like, you search for “pizza toppings”, and you get a bunch of pages talking about pizza and their toppings:

        There’s no unsolicited “AI” box at the top telling you to put rocks on there or anything insane like that. The availability of AI is there though, if you’re into that sort of thing. Click the “Quick answer” button and you get something like this:

        .

        There’s likely a way to directly invoke AI via their bang syntax (similar to DDG’s), but I don’t know what that is, 'cause I don’t use it.

        Either way, you can sign up and they give you 100 searches for free. You can trial it yourself if you like.

      • ragingHungryPanda@piefed.keyboardvagabond.comEnglish
        2·
        2 天前

        the AI is behind a menu and you don’t have to use it. sometimes it may generate a response card if you ask a question in the search box, but not always.

        the way the airplane works is that it will conduct multiple searches based on your prompt and then give an answer and citations, so you can click on them to go to where, even within an article, it got an answer. it isn’t always right, but it’s way better than relying on the training of an llm.

        but again, you don’t have to use it and it’s out of the way. you don’t even have to see it.

        I really like the service. it feels like the way search used to be, with exception that no one follows the old operators well anymore, eg +(this term) -(that term) NOT, etc

  • andra17@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 天前

    I find it especially annoying when companies have a “Contact us” button on their website and it just refers you to an AI assistant…

  • gustofwind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 天前

    Google/Bing (includes DuckDuckGo) will sometimes not show me the correct results but will instead have the correct results as sources in the ai search assistant

    Which is obviously intentional to pressure people to rely on the ai because their regular searches mysteriously fail to deliver the obviously correct results

    We’re just going to be forced into it and im pretty sure the battle is already lost and this is the evolution of the search engine, full stop ):

  • NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 天前

    The Google search AI has been giving me like the obvious solutions. Like the three things I tried tne minutes ago before I googled it. I already checked the menu and couldn’t find the setting or I wouldn’t be trying to get help online. And then the next seven search results are videos that don’t quite match my search. And the finally somewhere I find some promising leads on some message board that would have been the top result 6 years ago.

  • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    51·
    2 天前

    100%.

    I ran a team of techs for a few years. Before 2022, you had to eliminate possibilities, Google solutions, test, verify, etc… There could be any number of possibilities, depending on the problem. After LLMs, the sleuthing and learning became phrasing and forgetting. The phrasing being the prompt to the LLM.

    I even find myself getting rounded off at the edges. I throw a script or code I write into an LLM and have it check it for continuity or errors when something doesn’t work. It’s a slippery slope.

  • kboos1@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 天前

    I have the problem of it giving me very vague answers. For example: I recently made the switch back to a Samsung from using Sony phones for years because they don’t want Americans using their phone, I am a little salty. Now I can’t find simple settings and customizations because they are turned off or hidden by default on Samsung. So I go to the Google and it’s basically telling me to find it in settings, an hour or so later that’s when I find out it’s turned off and I have to turn on the feature because AI sent me on a wild goose chase, only to find the answer on a darn AI generated YouTube video.

    That was so frustrating and I think AI was just messing with me.

    • Spice Hoarder@lemmy.zipOP
      4·
      2 天前

      The other thing I discovered about AI is that the more the world changes, the less accurate it is. Seems obvious, but AI has almost no ability to tell between different software versions.

      It hallucinates, and mixes together facts that shouldn’t be corolated but are technically related.