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You know how Google gives you AI summary at the top now? It’s great, isn’t it?

No longer do you have to sift through multiple results to and give your device ad cancer just to get a simple answer to a question. Google just gives you the answer directly! It’s so great and helpful.

Except when it’s not, but it never says “I don’t know, check the results manually”, it just makes shit up. The other day I googled “geely pixel 9 wireless connection” because I couldn’t connect my pixel 9 to a geely car wirelessly. Google (the maker of the pixel 9) confidently described how the “Geely Pixel 9 is a device made by Geely…” and went on to give useless instructions.

This was a inconsequential query. What happens when you look up a serious topic and the sites that maintained that knowledge online no longer find it financially feasible? What happens when you rely on the trained model and that’s the only option? What happens when it hallucinates convincingly? Are you sure it hasn’t fooled you yet?

Social media created bubbles of ignorance and fake news, AI replacing search intends to eliminate the non-bubbles the rest of us seek and count on. What are you gonna do, drive to the library and read books every time you need to learn something new?

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Jmsnwbrd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You act like before Google we couldn’t figure things out. Sometimes not taking the easier/easiest way is better. We existed until the year 2000 without this futuristic computer in our pocket (technically longer) and we did just fine and we still had to suffer fools. Great example would be the emergence of AIDS spreading through the heterosexual community. Lots of disingenuous and lost humans and not a Google in sight. AI is computer driven and it’s counterpart will also be computer driven. . . I am convinced there will be a counterpart. We’ll have a “detect AI button” or something similar. If the program has language the program can be spotted. Scams, lies, propaganda, shilling, etc will always exist and the intelligence that creates these things will also have the chance to defeat these things. This is maybe naive or optimistic, but . . . so it goes.

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- MudMan@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  This is true. I had been thinking my previous post was a bit too optimistic, actually. For the sake of making a point I implied that conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers didn't previously exist. They existed. There was plenty of public conflict about masking and social distancing in the 1918 flu. The AIDS panic was horrific and obviously this isn't the first time that hate discourse puts fascists in power in a major superpower, let alone in a country overall.
  
  The real issue with the Internet isn't the flexibility of truth, it's the ease in diseminating the satisfying falsehood. With no source of authority over which truths are acceptable and what lies are shameful you end up in a worldwide radicalization engine. It's not that the old gatekeepers told you the truth, either. They still don't. But at least we all had some culture-wide baseline for acceptable narratives.
  
  But hey, people can keep hating ont he obvious boogeyman of AI. At least it's a start of realizing what the pattern is. It's still not "the end of truth", but like I said elsewhere, if it gets people to start noticing these things we'll be better off than when social media was doing the exact same thing to us as a global society without anybody realizing.
  
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MudMan@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It does say "check the results manually". Not that this changes anything. For the record, always double check anything any AI tells you unless you can verify the response off the top of your head. Also for the record, double check anything anybody else tells you. If you haven't seen it from more than one source, you don't know if it's true.

Hell, if the thing people learn from AI summaries is to never believe anything the see on the Internet without double checking it we'll be better off than we were before.

Also, every negative impact you assign to AI is also applicable to traditional search. I was hearing communication scholars warn people of the issues with algorithmic selection and personalized search back in the 90s. They were correct.

I am endlessly fascinated by the billions of boiling frogs that hadn't realized their perception of the world was owned by Google until Google made a noticeably change to their advertising engine. I am increasingly glad that AI is as unreliable as it is at this point.

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