The day DoubleClick destroyed it from the inside out. Once a company has a marketing agency, the whole company is a marketing agency. With all the pointless, short-term, mercenary thinking that entails.

Don’t use shit if you don’t really like shit. Who still uses google for simple search? It had its peak a loooooong time ago.

My daughter wanted to listen to some song, so obviously I just typed the part of the lyrics that she could remember. Something like “do you want to date me”. Of course I get a polite but firm AI telling me that it in fact cannot date me, since it’s a bot. It cam fuck right off, I’m searching for stuff here, not looking to be rejected by silicon.

Ad companies earn money by selling your attention.

Other people in your lives, like friends, absorb a lot of your attention and that’s a potential source of revenue.

All they need to do is replace your friends with a chatbot and they have a new way to sell access to you.

“Hey I’m here if you need someone” responses to searches indicating a potential emotional vulnerability are incredibly slimy and manipulative for blatantly financial purposes.

Google isn’t much different than romance scammers trolling the Internet for vulnerable people to groom for cash.

Pretty gross

I no longer understand computers, what they’re for, how they work, or what people do with them.

I want to live in a cabin far away from people with a Commodore 64 and a CB radio.

The moron’s won, remember LLMs are just prediction machines. if you see AI as intelligence then you really just fall left of the bell curve

around the time AI became a thing, they got progressively worst and more privacy intrusive, plus they started showing thier true colors right before trumps election.(when they decided to let youtube to allow right wing media unabated).

the latest thing is limiting accounts per phone, which is strange, but seems to happen at the same time reddit was forcing logins.

I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.

What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.

Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”

Y’know it’s funny, I just rewatched Her last night since my wife hasn’t seen it. Something that really struck me as somewhat overlooked on release was the undertone of “everyone is socially awkward and emotionally immature”, which has really aged like wine.

First of all, right from the opening scene, Theodore works at a company that writes “beautiful handwritten letters” by proxy. Later we learn there’s a married couple he’s been writing letters between since they first started dating. The whole film starts with the commodification of emotional connection.

Then there’s the phone sex girl, who asks him to choke her with a dead cat. Now, I’m no stranger to the kink community, but springing that on a random stranger mid-scene? That’s not something you just do. That’s a whole conversation with a consenting partner.

And no one takes rejection maturely. When Theodore goes on a date with Olivia Wilde’s character, everything is going great until she tries to get way too serious way too fast, on the first date. When Theodore doesn’t respond, she immediately says he’s “a real creepy dude” and shuts down. Then there’s Isabella.

Theodore is far from being unique in falling for an AI, since there’s already a service to provide surrogate bodies for human-AI relationships. But Isabella never meets him, never establishes boundaries, nothing. Now, I’m in an open relationship, and have brought women into the bedroom with my wife, but doing so without any kind of introduction or prep or anything is insane. But when Theodore doesn’t feel comfortable with the situation, Isabella has a breakdown. She doesn’t respect Theodore’s reluctance, all that matters is that she “wanted to be part of something pure”, without actually consulting the other human party involved.

Then there’s Charles, Amy’s husband, who clearly puts no effort into understanding her work, and decided he didn’t want to be married anymore after an argument about shoes.

And Catherine, who according to Amy had pretty volatile emotions, and seemed to project her own perfectionist insecurities onto Theodore, claiming he wanted her to be perfect when the story implies those were her own hangups.

I struggle to find a single character who seemed to be emotionally mature. They overreact, communicate poorly, and generally seem obsessively focused on themselves.

All of which is to say there’s no wonder they seemed to fall into parasocial relationships with AI. Having interacted with humans in the last 5 years, it seems like that kind of parasocial behavior is the most poignant prediction of the 2013 film. It seems like this “Google weirdness” is an accurate assessment of where we are as a species.

Google as a company, not the search engine specifically:

Google… gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I’m mostly ok with them

Writes an entire blog post complaining about them.

The fascists Nazis? Gee I wonder why they’re so weird. They sit at the fuhrer’s special table of honor whenever trump calls them

Its a me, Dario!

If you are going to insist on using google, you need to add -ai to every search. That will remove that stupid AI overview.

If you use Firefox like I do, you can add a google search option that does this automatically. Use the parameters: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s -AI

If you prefer DuckDuckGo, you can add a no ai option by adding a new search option using the parameters: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

Yea and honestly I think that is so sad