Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
How did this clickbaity headline got so many upvotes? Are we really cherry-picking some outlier example of a hallucination and using it to say “haha, google dumb”? I think there is plenty of valid criticism out there against google that we can stick to instead of paying attention to stupid and provocative articles
I mean, how about my boring example from work the other day? I wanted to double check whether priority mail had guaranteed delivery timeframes before telling a customer that they did not and if she needed something by a specific day she should use UPS. When I searched “is priority mail delivery date guaranteed”, the first real answer, from USPS’s website, was a resounding no, just like I thought. Guess what Google’s AI told me? “Priority mail is a guaranteed service, so you can choose it knowing that your package will be delivered on the projected date.”
It’s fucking stupid. It’s wrong. It should not be at the top of search results.