Today I searched for a CD ISO filename on Google. Just the first part of the ISO name. I knew it was an ISO for Win 7, just not which one. I wanted to find a site that had the ISOs in an archival listing so I knew which version it was.
Google gave me zero results except AI telling me what I already knew. It’s a filename.
Zero.
Google is garbage. Google search is dead.
Only Google’s AI?
My bran?!?
That’s what helps me poop!
Jokes on them i use Brave /s
I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: ChatGPT’s search function is substantially better than Google’s AI search. And Google’s AI search is, frankly, so broken that it can barely be considered functional in some situations.
I think part of the problem is that Google is asking its AI to serve two fundamentally conflicting purposes. It doesn’t just want an LLM that does LLM things. It wants an LLM that also functions as a marketing engine. And that makes sense from Google’s perspective because Google is, at its core, an advertising company that happens to operate some enormously successful technology platforms. Advertising is how Google makes the overwhelming majority of its money, so naturally it wants its AI to become part of that ecosystem.
The problem is that optimizing an AI for advertising inevitably compromises its usefulness as an information system. The AI’s job should be to determine what information is most relevant to the user’s question and present it as accurately and efficiently as possible. An advertising platform has an entirely different objective: determine what can be sold, who will pay for access to the user, and how to maximize engagement and revenue. Those objectives can overlap, but they are not the same objective.
And this gets even more interesting when you consider what increasingly capable AI systems are supposed to become. The fundamental value of an LLM, AGI, or whatever comes after AGI is that it can act as an intermediary between a human being and an enormous body of information, reasoning about what the human actually needs rather than simply presenting whatever happens to be profitable to show them.
You can certainly put advertisements around an AI. You can even have an AI identify products or services that are relevant to a user. But the moment the AI itself becomes financially incentivized to favor one answer, product, company, or piece of information over another, you have fundamentally compromised the thing that makes the AI useful in the first place.
A calculator doesn’t work better because the person who made it gets paid when you enter a particular number. A search engine shouldn’t give you a different answer because someone paid it to prefer that answer. And an intelligent system certainly shouldn’t be quietly optimizing its reasoning around whoever is willing to pay for access to your attention.
The irony is that the more capable AI becomes, the less compatible that model should be with traditional advertising. Advertising depends on controlling what people see. Intelligence depends on being able to determine what is actually relevant. Those are fundamentally different incentives.
As usual, the limiting factor may not be the technology itself. It may simply be our inability to resist turning every useful invention into another machine for extracting money from one another.
I don’t even know her
The amount of times I’ve gone to a top ranked website by duckduckgo and read the first paragraph only to go “oh this is just more slop” is ridiculous. I have to append reddit to every search to get anything useful and even then it could be bots.
Why does the author assume I’m dumber than them. I basically never use AI. It’s stupid and pulls shit from the Internet and just assumes it’s correct. I, on the other hand, have media literacy and can figure out which info is useful and likely accurate myself. It’s like asking a chronic liar a question. It’s a waste of time when we have DDG and a few brain cells.
