I have it disabled through an extension on my phone’s Iceraven browser. Can’t bother reading those. I need the Wikipedia/website info.
Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.
That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.
LLMs fundamentally can’t learn. They will continue to fail the same thing over and over until they guess and check into a response that appears coherent and correct.
When the old new ways become the old ways and i cant keep up with the new new ways
AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It’s absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It’s like we’re collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
And had a useful answer about 1 in 20 times.
What’s even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just “define socks” and you’d get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?
Indeed.
I’m pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don’t want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.
“Innovation” lol
All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
It’s like getting the info from some rando at some party. It’s to be lightly penciled in.
for any question worth asking
Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don’t need pages of context, are not worth asking?
Okay so how much glue to keep the cheese on my pizza?
4 seems like a good amount.
I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an “answer” with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don’t contain the actual info being presented.
But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026… (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
Ooo, they’re cramming in the ads now eh?
Fucking hell, lol
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears’ quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an “illegal handoff”, which I had never seen before.
I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like “Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!”
I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can’t do that.
AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.
It’s not just wrong. It’s plausibly wrong, which is worse. It’s the difference between giving someone a recipe for cookies where you fuck up the ratio of flour and sugar vs giving someone a recipe for cooking where you’ve jokingly put “50 pounds of gunpowder” in there as an ingredient. People know the obvious wrong thing is wrong. But they’ll bake the fucked up ratio cookies and then just not know what went wrong.
There’s a site for that…let me remember the name… Wikipedia! There it is.
This is the way
The funniest part is I’ve gotten better answers from duckeuckgo and Bing’s AI back in the day because they both didn’t treat reddit as a reputable source of info lmao.
Dunno how the scene is now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its the same.
My go to. I used to use Google for harder to search stuff, but these days Google isnt worth the try anymore.
I refuse to use AI but my boss only uses it. He has not found a correct answer to a query for 6 months.
May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.
They even have a direct URL for it if you don’t want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
That’s right. I didn’t put the question in the search bar for you to tell me the answer. That question was the first shoveling of dirt in a 6 hour rabbit hole that I was fixing to explore.
6? That’s rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.
The Wikipedia marathon doesn’t stop til you get to Hitler.
You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.
THIS! I recall somebody doing contract review and having AI summarize the contracts just to see how well they did… The AI left out some really important stuff and also occasionally hallucinated stuff that wasn’t there. Summarizing a contract should be pretty black-n-white – if AI can’t handle that properly, I’m not going to trust its summary of something more complex.
I hate it when i need to google programming stuff because Google Gemini LOVES to make stuff up and takes up half a page trying to answer
stop googling, start ducking.
is “ducking” an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn’t sound any sillier than googling
Don’t you dare duck with me!
I know the rankings change like every month, but isn’t Gemini one of the “dumber” ones? I’ve only tried it a few times and got annoyed, but it’s been a while.
It’s certainly no leader for software engineering tasks.
