OhhhJa posted...
No they dont. They do occasionally return garbage but it's definitely not "more often than not" in my experience.
It probably depends on what you're looking up.
It happens often enough for me that it's not even remotely worth using at all. If not 50% of the time, it's pretty damned close. A lot of time, it's actually trying to answer a question I didn't even ask it, so it's 100% worthless regardless of whether or not the info is accurate or not.
It's very similar to years ago, when people were still praising Google search, but I found it to be more or less useless for every single thing I wanted to look up (Yahoo search actually worked better most of the time), except for reverse image look-ups. And even then, it was really only worth using not because it was
good
, but because it had managed to out-compete most of the better options on other sites.
Google's enshittification isn't a
new
thing. It just took some people longer to notice than others.
bachewychomp posted...
Defenders will say something like "it's just another tool" but we've seen enough throughout history to know that none of these productivity benefits will be passed on to the worker
To be fair, I'm one of the people who say "it's just another tool". Usually when defending AI art.
The problem is, in the case of AI being used for Internet searches, it's a tool that is broken. If I had a stove that only cooked at the right temperature unpredictably 50% of the time, I probably wouldn't be using it to cook my food. If it occasionally poisoned my food to boot, I
definitely
wouldn't be using it to cook dinner.
I have no problems with the moral or ethical considerations of AI. I just don't think it
works
in most of the applications it's being forced into. There's a push being driven by corporate greed to shove it into everything with very little consideration or preparation, and the end result is that almost everything it's going into is made worse in the process. And because companies are spending so much to integrate it, they have a vested interest in forcing you to use it, so often you don't even have the option to opt out.
But I'll listen to fake AI music on YouTube or fake movie trailers or look at pretty pictures, and it doesn't seem all that worse than what Hollywood is actually putting out these days, so I welcome our robotic entertainment overlords.
The problem with AI isn't AI. The problem with AI is corporate mentality.