On the bright side I used to be extremely online but shit has been getting steadily worse for so long that I don’t even have to set limits for myself anymore because there’s like 30 minutes per day of worthwhile internet.
Yeah, the main sites are somehow managing to squander their infinite content factories. It’s like the procedurally generated video games where everything is theoretically unique, but you learn to recognize the patterns and everything feels the same.
It’s like the procedurally generated video games
The big difference is that AI bots have distinctly less personality than any NPC/Enemy in Diablo 2
I think that if game companies can find good corpuses to train on and train their own LLMs with less strict respectability filters, using AI for NPC dialogue could be a legitimate boon to immersion. It’s one of the few cases where I could see LLMs being ethically sourced (for example using the massive amounts of text in The Elder Scrolls universe to train on) and not displacing too many jobs since there would still need to be writers for main quests and for guiding plot points on random encounters.
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Nonzero chance we’ll all have to go back to using physical libraries for research in a few years, so I guess that’s a silver lining.
You mean the ones being constantly defunded and having their reading materials banned?
I mean for research I’d prefer to use either a university or reference library. But even an underfunded library with banned books is a better resource than a largely unmonitored black box that confidently lies to you. At least when you look for a resource and it’s not there you’re certain in the lack of information.
you’re certain in the lack of information
If you know that information is missing, yes.
Glad I’ve been hoarding books
i think this is a genuine possibility in schools now, at least in my country. maybe not removing access to the internet entirely, but at least severely restricting it, and going back to analog teaching methods wherever possible.
we were very early on digitalizing education btw, giving every elementary school kid their own tablet, implementing digital tools in almost every subject, and in recent years, replacing physical books with digital copies.
and surprise surprise, it’s been a fucking disaster. i can’t even imagine what it’ll be like as AI gets more widespread
How much of it has to do with the fact that adults are just as clueless about how to use computers as kids?
Is it really that hard to just have people use computers the same way they’d use books? Not everything needs to start with a Google search.
I love this trend of “feature that is like something that already exists but is shittier and uses more resources”
Also ad “features that exist, are now shittier, and btw, you now have to pay and oh also btw yes you will have ads even with payment. Problem? Go fuck yourself.”
Great trend
A lot of this content was already auto-generated in the sense that there are a lot of sites which operate on the business model of generic structure, data scrape, generate article about release date of popular movie or game. I imagine as a replacement of those sites this might actually be a mild improvement… well until it starts hallucinating release dates and also performs worse than human scrapers confusing new movies with ones they are remakes of or just have similar titles.
Like I said shittier and consumes more electricity
Given the current state of google search results this really just sounds like cutting out the middleman. Complaints from SEO powered garbage like the spruce fall on deaf ears.
Somehow tech finds new ways for me to respect it less and less.
Reminds me of how StackOverflow is dying a slow death thanks to chat gippidee. Their numbers dropped just as it was coming out.
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Spend more money, to get a shittier result. Capitalism at it’s finest. No notes.
Cool, google search results will somehow become even more useless. Incredible stuff
Sometimes when I Google the legality of certain things in my state, it brings up the laws in other states at the very top box lol. Can’t wait for AI to make search results good against completely making shit up instead of giving me inaccurate answers
In one of the forums for the niche hobby I’m into, Google snippets have already been causing chaos for years.
Eg: “You’re wrong because Google says that I need to do this”. Well Google is wrong and doing that is the entire reason why you’re having so many problems.
When investigating how the snippet was made it’s either from a review or forum comment made by a newbie that somehow got traction or often someone saying DON’T do it that way, but their algorithm doesn’t pick up the nuance and gets it twisted.
More recently it’s been through taking snippets of entirely AI pages that write absolute gibberish which sound impressive to people with only a passing familiarity.This is gonna make things sooooooo much worse.
I wonder if this will happen: “To make a chocolate milkshake: 1. Thank you kind stranger!..” And then news will break that Google is claiming a malformed algorithm caused their AI to suck up the entirety of Reddit. And after that Google will be forced to admit “Oh, oops!” the wonky algorithm caused Google to suck up ginormous amounts of data from 10,000s of sites on the net. Then they’ll say they’re “untraining” which is another big lie. All they’ll do as fast as they can is smooth out plagiarism so they can have deniability.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a few years from now Google’s legal team is at the supreme court claiming something ridiculous. Some of the best legal minds in the US are pushing the bullshit idea that AI cannot plagiarize because it doesn’t know what plagiarism actually is. And the GOP majority seems to love the idea.
why? genuinely who does this help and how does it make google money? it seems like they’re paying for the energy for ai content in exchange for absolutely nothing
The people internally at Google are techbro true believers. If it’s new technology it is inherently good and an improvement.
God, it’s sad but you’re probably right. We had to implement something AI-related at work because the board all had massive hard ons for the buzzwords. They literally could not have given less of a shit what we used it for. We had full autonomy as long as ChatGPT ended up in our dependency tree somewhere.
Same here. Every all hands at work emphasizes the need to use AI. Except they have no clue what to do with it yet beyond chatbots but we need to use it right now or else.
The theory is that people don’t want to click through blue links trying to find a source (or sources) they can trust, they rather want an instant summarised answer to any question. Google already does instant summarised answers for things like “when is the next public holiday” - generative AI content would expand these instant answers to any question, at the cost of accuracy. Google thinks ChatGPT is taking their market share (which it kinda is, and kinda was a year ago when they started developing this). The big idea of this new feature from Google is to retain market share, which is a prerequisite to making money.
