Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
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.”
They also highlight the fact that Google’s AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge, it is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past indiscriminately scraped from the internet and (sometimes) remixed to look like something plausibly new and “intelligent.”
This. “AI” isn’t coming up with new information on its own. The current state of “AI” is a drooling moron, plagiarizing any random scrap of information it sees in a desperate attempt to seem smart. The people promoting AI are scammers.
I mean in this case it’s probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.
Yeah, just like that x-files episode with the sushi and the theme of teaching them well.
Have you forgotten the reasoning power of artificial intelligence?