Why AI Search Blew Up in Google’s Face
Why AI Search Blew Up in Google’s Face
The search giant advised us to eat glue and rocks and maybe even try walking off a cliff. The gaffes are part of a much bigger story.
Why would anyone think it would work? It's a stupid idea.
It's not about whether it works, it's about proving that they're keeping pace with the trends in technology that they're not directly driving.
They're afraid that if they don't give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that's what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that's what will happen.
AI funding is so far up it's own backside I'm not sure they'll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.
That sounds right. But it makes no practical sense. Everybody relies on Google search. That's a huge part of what makes them powerful. They shouldn't screw with it, and that's not a moral statement about what they owe to users, it's just about self-interest. Ruining your own base product is idiotic.
It seems like such a weird thing to marry up with internet searching. This method where the algorithms can & will “hallucinate” and just make shit up vs finding very specific information that a person is searching for. Why ever trust these LLMs with facts? These things should’ve only ever been marketed for creative writing and art, not shit like writing legal briefs and school papers and such.
Maybe I can share some insight into why one might want to.
I hate searching the internet. It's a massive mental drain for me to try figure out how I should put my problem into words that others with similar ideas will have done before me - it's my mental processing power wasted on purely linguistic overhead instead of trying to understand and learn about the problem.
I hate the (dis-/mis-)informational assault I open myself to by skimming through the results, because the majority of them will be so laughably irrelevant, if not actively malicious, that I become a slightly worse person every time I expose myself.
And I hate visiting websites. Not only because of all the reasons modern websites suck, but because even if they are a delight in UX, they are distracting me from what I really want, which is (most of the time) information, not to experience someone's idiosyncratic, artistic ideas for how to organise and present data, or how to keep me 'engaged'.
So yes, I prefer stupid a language model that will lie about facts half the time and bastardise half my prompts if it means I can glance a bit of what the internet has to say about something, because I can more easily spot plausible bullshit and discard it or quickly check its veracity than I can magic my vague problem into a suitable query only to sift through more ignorance, hostility, and implausible bullshit conjured by internet randos instead.
And yes, LLMs really do suck even in their domain of speciality (language - because language serves a purpose, and they do not understand it), and they are all kinds of harmful, dangerous, and misused. Given how genuinely ignorant people are of what an LLM really is and what it is really doing, I think it's irresponsible to embed one the way google has.
I think it's probably best to.. uhh.. sort of gatekeep this tech so that it's mostly utilised by people who understand the risks. But capitalism is incompatible with niches and bespoke products, so every piece of tech has to be made with absolutely everyone as a target audience.
This article was a lot of words with very little information.
Written with ChatGPT no doubt
Because AI doesn't exist.