Submitted 3 days ago by m_f@discuss.online to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/94c3c97e-f44e-465b-8219-2b7acc263367.png
Not sure who is doing this exactly, if it’s DDG or Reddit or someone else. I was looking for a comparison of epic vs steam and noticed that the description of the search result is AI-generated, instead of actually showing anything from the thread.
A user asks why they should buy games on Steam rather than Epic, and gets various answers from other users. Some of the reasons include Steam’s features, performance, community, and exclusivity.
I miss the days when you would get a cached page highlighting the exact places where the search engine found your keywords. The pool of websites felt bottomless and the only thing holding you back was the challenge of picking the exact perfect combination of search terms and operators to narrow it down.
Search engines have no nuance anymore. It feels like they just dumb down your search to the most relevant thing you can buy now and fill out the rest with vaguely related filler sites. That or they dump you on quora where they will harass you to log in to read anything and spam you mercilessly if you do.
I agree, this is really annoying. It’s taking the place of what used to be an excerpt, giving me a hint about actual text on the page.
I haven’t seen that yet… hopefully it’s on the Duckduckgo side and a setting I can turn off. But it’s probably Reddit continuing to be frustrating.
From what I understand, this is a Bing bug feature that makes its way “downstream” to DuckDuckGo results. Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
lol, is that why duckduckgo was down yesterday?
I’ve noticed this a month ago or so, but not on Reddit but for Wikipedia. And it’s genuinely so awful, and cringe and bad in comparison to the normal description that just works great.
Jesus Christ. Enshittification because of “AI” is getting out of hand.
If this isn’t happening in other search engines, then DDG is likely doing it, which would be awful as it neuters the point of showing snippets for search results.
I have the feeling that it’s reddit showing that ai slop when they see the crawler
Most likely DDG, but you can disable it with a couple of clicks.
That’s epic. But I already have the setting on ddg to only use AI when prompted to
I saw that yesterday specifically on Reddit posts in my search for a software issue, and not on sites like stackoverflow, so my money is on reddit
I should use this AI to make helpful comments for my code.
//Add 1 to i i = i + 1; //Check if a number is even bool isEven(int num)
Iirc reddit only allows google to index them, all reddit results should be old ones so I doubt they implemented ai for that.
Digg does this too and I really enjoy it. I don’t see the problem.
The problem I see is that it introduces another degree of separation between the user and the wider Internet. Instead of indexing sites, browsers are trying to interpret them for us. The extreme edge case of this is not having websites at all anymore, just apps and an omniscient AI that answers anything. Cool in theory, but in practice these omniscient beings really aren’t and instead are very fallible. Presumably these tools are also owned by corporations with shareholder values that are often contrary to user values. I can only speak for myself, but I experience these summaries as a loss of control over how I interact with the Internet and a step down a path I would rather not tread.
In this example the AI also does not provide anything valuable. It only defines a forum thread in terms of the question asked.
The very last sentence of its summary provides extremely useful context that may make you want to click through to find more in-depth answers. I have noidea what you’re talking about.
The problem is when you’re searching up a problem, you typically want its whole context. If you need AI summarizarions, you would instead ask for it from your preferred AI, not search it.
Absolutely nothing is stopping you from reading through for the full context. Y’all are just insufferable.
True
I have a problem with it. None of the information in that summary is useful except for maybe the list of Steam features at the end. So… about four words out of the whole thing.
The rest is context that I can already assume based off the page title and the URL, without some AI limply regurgitating it to me.
The first part literally summarizes the context, and the last part summarizes the reasons, it’s extremely concise you’re just nitpicking and bitchy.
Not sure I’m annoyed either. But lemmy will tell me to be!
Every time I come back here, I remember why I stay away longer and longer. It’s just the most extreme people from Reddit that never went back.
cool!
hddsx@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
A user makes a post expressing mild infuriation on a search result with an AI summary, and gets various results from other users. Sole users express delight at summaries, others prefer to use their preferred AI interface.
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
A user replies to a user who replied to a user, each reflecting on the presence of AI-generated summaries, ultimately creating a self-aware loop of commentary that mirrors the exact summarization style being discussed, much to the amusement and mild existential dread of all involved.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Something something mechaHitler.