[onesociety2022]

I love AI summary and AI mode in Google search. I think it should be up to you (the human) to use your judgement to decide when to do further research by following the links and when to just rely on the AI summary. If I'm searching a TV show by name, I'm generally just looking for an overview, the IMDb rating and a review of that show. If AI summary gets that wrong, it's not the end of the world. I don't bother doing further research. There are a lot of such casual searches I do daily for which AI summary is good enough.

OTOH if I'm looking up an answer to a tax question, I don't just immediately trust the first answer from AI mode. I use it more as a knowledgeable friend who is not a tax attorney and so cannot be 100% trusted, but he/she is giving me useful pointers to go do deeper research and arrive at an answer.

[seanmcdirmid]

Same. AI still makes a lot of mistakes. Like today I was looking for new smoke detectors, and it clarified and then forgot Washington state code multiple times, and then ignored alternatives that were better fit for my problem until I asked pointed questions, and kept recommending solutions that I absolutely didn’t want to consider (or couldn’t because of WA code). If it wasn’t a conversation, it would have gone from a great to a disastrous experience.

[calvinmorrison]

well the "AI" is smart because the search is "DUMB" if I google "how long do I fry an egg" I don't need an article with 600 words about the ladys grandmums special egg recipe, but thats how SEO got us here.

[Boss0565]

i just use chat for everything now. if i need a link, ill ask it to provide one.

[Retric]

How can you stand how much slower that is?

For me the basic process means typing more, reading a needlessly verbose answer, and then half the time finding out it was wrong anyway.

[jorl17]

Absolutely this.

I left google for chagpt/claude, but have slowly been coming back because these results have become rather useful -- especially when google inspects actual video content to produce replies. This is one of the best outcomes of the AI wave for me: content which was locked away in YouTube videos and forced me to consume it sequentially (without power-reading as I do with articles) is now indexed in search results in some AI summary. It makes mistakes, but it lets me figure out the right videos to watch, and often gives me enough context to find the solution myself. This applies to work, but also to something as simple as game walkthroughs!

As with everything, you need to know when to trust and when to doubt, when to iterate on chat (or chat with it with a smarter assistant like ChatGPT/claude). Hasn't it always been this way (minus the chat)?

I don't understand why people seem to be under this idea that just because it's at the top of a search results page it must be entirely correct, when we have spent decades knowing that you can't trust what's on the internet and you need to have critical thinking. Were you blindly trusting your first-page google results? What about when Wikipedia was starting, were you also trusting it blindly? Do you trust it blindly now?

In fact, when google started stealing the content of websites to display it, wasn't it already producing largely incorrect results because so many hits were SEO-garbage or outdated? (Not that we don't need to address the fact that this steals traffic from websites -- but it's a problem that PREDATES AI and absolutely still needs to be addressed somehow)

I can understand it if they believe the average joe will be more likely to blindly trust this, but that's an education problem -- and one we already had and has perhaps been compounded.

The visceral hate for a a life-changing technology that enables us to do more, faster, never ceases to amaze me. I'm growing so tired of it around my inner circles.

I get that there is a real bubble with real overhype and that some companies are profiting from it and shoving it down everyone's throats. I get that your actual life is worse because of this (you are forced to use shit models to produce more features while being paid the same). I get that maybe your job might change, and that for some people they will actually need to job-hop. This all absolutely sucks and it is a problem for many people, I get that! But that doesn't make the technology as a whole terrible, much less a bunch of its amazing applications. It's this constant wave of negativity, like nothing good will ever come out of AI and we're all doomed to be cornered by the big evil corporations that will run us dry.

It's hard to be rational when you're overcome with emotion and fear, I know, but it's so aggravating to have to interact with someone who can only see the technology itself as negative.