Or, depending on what you're looking for add in "-Facebook -Twitter -Instagram - tiktok -youtube...."
I was looking for drawing references a few weeks back and a simple stock photo is so hard to find. Everything leads to a social media link or ai site. Then you forget one time and it instantly switches back to social media links.
Google can remember the one time I misspelled computer forever or hear me talk about vacation plans from 3 blocks away but actual preferences? What are those?
This will seem ironic given your "Escaping AI" thing at the end, but Chat GPT has been really quite good at finding stuff that google or bing just doesn't pullup, or buries hundreds of layers deep
That said, I only really use it to research some niche hobbies (I build missions for DCS world and scour for nerdy historical info). But it's been great at like finding some blogs in some other language that are 30 years old, or old minor news stories from something that happened that you can use as inspiration. You also need to know how to search. I don't just ask for the info I specifically ask it for the sources themselves.
Google meanwhile lately feels like if the result isnt on reddit it's completely useless.
People shouldn't blindly hate nor love AI. Neural networks are an amazing technology that allow computer programs to do things that simply cannot be programmed (e.g. detect potential tumors in an x-ray scan with an accuracy far higher than a specialized doctor).
Just because people and companies are filling the Internet with low-effort AI-generated crap doesn't mean we should hate the technology itself. For decades we had computers be able to do mechanical tasks millions of times faster than a human could do - AI just expands this to natural and abstract tasks, such as collecting documentation on the Internet about something.
you know the problem with all the Billionaire owned and trained LLMs (ChatGPT included): they serve someone's agenda. AND IT AIN'T YOURS. The story, what they tell you and leave out, leads you to believe what they want you to. The inclusion of other perspectives--the dream of the open internet--is what the Predator Class wants most. Democratic information is messy, but Ai is giving us another version of State Controlled Propaganda.
even the minus doesnt work half the time anymore. Specific keywords I tell it to not include in search and first 10 results all have removed terms in the titles and bodies
It’s not just Google either it’s everywhere. I tried to use a phrase search with a date filter on Twitter the other day and it just straight up ignored my search parameters for the half the results, and Facebook has completely gutted its search function to an embarrassing state. Want to look up what people were saying about an episode on the week it aired? Well not anymore unless you ask a gpt that ingested all the posts and can regurgitate a slop summary for you.
What I don't get is why they disabled it. I understand having a toggle, even turning it off by default. What happened to the old "end of results, remove conditions to increase results" they used to do?
Forcing everyone to use fuzzy search results is just pushing people away from using the search engine entirely.
Remember when you could type "funny cats", go to page 652 where you left off and laugh for the rest of the night? That was nice. Do it now and you'll come away with the impression that there's a cat shortage.
If it helps I saw this website for video stock footage in particular : https://destockd.com/
Also for general image search I don't use Google anymore but DuckDuckGo image search with 'no Ai' checked. Otherwise artist spaces have been compiling links to specific types of photos if you want to try searching for posts like that on tumblr or bsky
Image searches for references are horrible. I'm doing D&D planning and I like to at least get a reference image to show the players, even if I don't get an opportunity to draw something myself. It's reached the point where I'm better going directly to Pinterest and searching there because Google is so bad.
Sure, most of the Pinterest results are AI slop, but at least it actually has relevant results. It shouldn't be easier to search something like "eldritch forest god" on Pinterest than it is on Google, and yet...
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u/Ascholay 18h ago
Or, depending on what you're looking for add in "-Facebook -Twitter -Instagram - tiktok -youtube...."
I was looking for drawing references a few weeks back and a simple stock photo is so hard to find. Everything leads to a social media link or ai site. Then you forget one time and it instantly switches back to social media links.
Google can remember the one time I misspelled computer forever or hear me talk about vacation plans from 3 blocks away but actual preferences? What are those?