with bonus video version
This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect this is gonna prompt an uptick in Google crawlers getting blocked. Mainly because Google just removed any real reason for people not to block them.
Google, killing one of its products because their executives make shit decisions? Unheard of.
What if we burned the Library of Alexandria, but the scrolls were printed on money?
if one presumes the money is gold and thus the scrolls were thin-film heavy metals, aerosolisation of that would explain quite a bit of the current situation
i have been Called
gold is pretty much nontoxic, definitely bulk (gold teeth anyone?), maybe as nanoparticles. gold compounds can be, like any other heavy metal, but it’s so inert that these won’t form in air under any normal conditions. lead will get oxidized much more easily, and if you’re riffing on leaded gasoline then it’s lead oxide particles that made it work in the first place, so it’s already in bioavailable form, and full brain damage is only seen some 20 years down the road
Here’s some food for thought; ha ha, only serious. What if none of this is new?
If this is a dealbreaker today, then it should have been a dealbreaker over a decade ago, when Google first rolled out Knowledge panels, which were also often inaccurate and unhelpful.
If this isn’t acceptable from Google, then it shouldn’t be acceptable from DuckDuckGo, which has the same page-one results including an AI summary and panels, nor any other search engines. If summaries are unacceptable from Gemini, which has handily topped the leaderboards for weeks, then it’s not acceptable using models from any other vendor, including Alibaba, High-Flyer, Meta, Microsoft, or Twitter.
If fake, hallucinated, confabulated, or synthetic search results are ruining the Web today, then they were ruining the Web over two decades ago and have not lessened since. The economic incentives and actors have shifted slightly, but the overall goal of fraudulent clicks still underlies the presentation.
If machine learning isn’t acceptable in collating search results today, then search engines would not exist. The issue is sheer data; ever since about 1991, before the Web existed, there has been too much data available on the Internet to search exhaustively and quickly. The problem is recursive: when a user queries a popular search engine, their results are populated by multiple different searchers using different techniques to learn what is relevant, because no one search strategy works at scale for most users asking most things.
I’m not saying this to defend Google but to steer y’all away from uncanny-valley reactionism. The search-engine business model was always odious, but we were willing to tolerate it because it was very inaccurate and easy to game, like a silly automaton which obeys simple rules. Now we are approaching the ability to conduct automated reference interviews and suddenly we have an “oops, all AI!” moment as if it weren’t always generative AI from the beginning.
This is specifically about the current shitty “AI Overview” that is currently and specifically pissing people off and Google essaying that as the only interface to search. (Sure they might not, but OTOH predicting future behaviour from past behaviour.)
That they did fucking terrible overviews in the past is not some sort of excuse for the current and specific issue with the current and specific AI Overviews.
wtf with calling hating this extremely hateworthy shit “uncanny-valley reactionism”
It’s not the Uncanny Valley. It’s Shit Mountain.
is this a pokemon level? I ask for the benefit of 2600 shitty LLMs
