My wife works at a library. People constantly come in asking to use the library fax machine, because Google's AI says they have one.

They don't have one. Their website says they don't have one. But LLMs have determined it's plausible for libraries to have a fax machine, so Google tells people that they have one.

You'd be surprised at the number of people who can't accept that people working at the library know more about the library than Google.

Also very lengthy all the time. It can't really summarise without rambling. It's in no way succinct and too chatty. Verbose, you might say. Garrulous even. Loquacious, if you prefer. Needs to pipe down. Can't rein it in. Doesn't shut the fuck up.

Let's dig into that.

_Oh wow, I was reading some other websites to summarize this one, and apparently their competitor (who happened to pay for ad placement on this websites name plus url) says this website throws puppies into volcanos!

Oh, and you need to eat 6 rocks a day for your nutrition.

Was this summary helpful, or do you also throw puppies into volcanos?_

I'd be surprised if this isn't already happening or at the very least being tested on a smaller scale.

How long? Brother, controlling the narrative is the entire point of why AIs are being shoved down your throat

Wow the masses with their Mechanical Turk, then pull the strings behind the scenes whenever you need to tip the scale in your favor. Drive engagement with your product? Sus out new innovations that could threaten your business model? Manufacture consent for your international apartheid resource extraction project? Stifle populist grassroots political movements at home?

You already know it’s true because you laugh about Grok every time it truth-dunks on Elon. We’re all collectively like “wow he can’t even control it enough to share his warped PR version of reality” which means we fucking know why these things exist: to gaslight the human race to the will of the capitalist ruling class

That is actually happening right now.

🤷

What really scares me are IT-illiterate politicians who swallowed the US generated narrative that AI is the next big thing, hook, line and sinker. And the waste of resources AI is adding to our already ravaged global ecosystem.

No thats this one.

Reminds me of Trump saying "everybody's saying..."

Maybe it could actually fix microslops crappy online documentation library, thats pro customer.

Relink all the broken links, fix outdated information from patches where they never bothered updating it.

Browsing the modern internet without uBlock origin and maybe a cookie consent blocker is truly a horrible experience.

This, and newspaper writing style which endlessly beats around the bush, actually are the reasons for the mainstream accepting AI summaries. AI summaries only work because the Internet is a hellscape of intentionally bad UX with site-owners being hostile towards their users.

Don't forget the requests for location access that the site totally definitely needs...

How the FUCK are people okay with the sign in with Google pop up?

If you have any sign up with Google it adds itself to your site. Then it hijacks the user session by showing a large dialogue over your content. No, you can’t disable that, and if you do they might block visitors from finding your site. They might not, but maybe they will.

There are some good arguments to be made that Google happily pushed this development along, maybe even created it. Never forget, they're formost an ad broker. Everything else is just a means to that end.

Those aren't the valuable sites, though. They're content/SEO farms whose main purpose is to serve ads to eyeballs for profit. Many of those ads are hosted by Google themselves.

And which tech giant threw up their hands and let those shit-tier websites take over search results... I'll give you one guess.

Shotout to all those "When does season X of Y come out" sites that serve no purpose.

I doubt it, for example Wikipedia is about as clean as it gets for knowledge sites, and their traffic is down significantly. The ai summaries of wiki articles are usually almost the same as the summary at the top of the wiki page, so if people have enough info with the summary, then they're not clicking through.

It’s already collapsed

Stackoverflow he's been collapsing way before the advent of GPTs.

It's been a while that I needed to visited Stack Overflow. When I need a coding question answered, I ask Claude Code. Just like back then with answers from Stack Overflow, I still do the sanity checks and verification using my own natural neural network. AI is pretty useful as an assistant for coding if you are able to properly review the generated code.

"Hi we noticed you're running an adblocker. You'll have to turn that off to see our site"

I call that one the ol' go fuck yourself.

Yes, but surely Google's plan long term is to be the one placing those ad booby traps and taking the money from that shopkeep, but obviously not in an evil way, that'd be weird.

Opens the door a crack

"WE ARE USING COOKIES TO TRACK YOU!"

And when you try to head for the door, it opens a few inches before slamming shut, forcing you to stay in the store. Even looking that direction? Yep, another newsletter pop up.

The number of times I've seen AI overviews directly contradict the source material...

You're not thinking that far ahead. Eventually the AI summary will have embedded ads.

"That's a nice website but why don't you try this one over here...."

Google actually just patented a system where an algorithm decides that your web page is boring and generates a new one on the fly.

In your example, many browsers will do simple math or conversions in the address bar without AI, and google gave that same answer prior to AI with a simple conversion menu box that showed up as you said. It still does sometimes depending on the question.

More realistically it would be “How long is a Boeing 747?” Now an AI will give you a length range and offer that there are different 747 models manufactured in different years, etc.

So instead of clicking on an ad-supported “aviation info” site like you say, odds are the asker will just take the provided summary and not proceed any further, or refine the question to a specific model that again an AI will probably answer, even possibly ironically scraping the content from the very same “aviation info” site that would have received your click 5 years ago, but now google gets the view and the site doesn’t.

The websites only obscure the answer because google would run the query and present the answer in the summary without giving them a click through.

Content theft has been going on much much longer than you realise.

@thisecommercelife@lemmy.world what are the chances OP was reaaaallllly the OP!