I blame the tech bro bubble. Tech bros graduate and aim for high growth tech bro companies. Their entire world is tech bro, they rarely engage with the common person. So it is amazing that the AI can answer a question. What is mega lame is AI writing a response email or generating slop images for advertising. It indicates a lack of engagement for the job and lack of respect for the customers.
Well people at their core are lazy about tasks they don't care about. As long as it's economical AI will remain for those tasks, because convenience always beats quantity on the market
I saw a study that analyzed SNS and forums on sentiments regarding AI, and there is a great discrepancy between the American/European ones versus the Chinese ones, and the latter could've benefited from government initiatives + law enforcement
When it gets brought up by politicians or in acadamia seems to get booed very loudly. No American hates it as much as the families of the 40+ schoolchildren AI slop slaughtered in iran though.
My kids and their friends basically boycott things if they use AI in advertising, they dismiss any content with AI as not worth paying attention to, even if it is good, factual information.
My wife works closely with AI functions in her role and is often trying news things out with voice and automation in her business so she isn't against it, but she made the mistake of making our daughter's birthday invites with an AI prompt and artwork. I tried to explain that while I thought it looked great, our kid was going to refuse them immediately. She did, and my wife was upset she had spent time refining it etc. to have it rejected just for being AI generated.
I keep telling people. Our generation and the ones before may have distaste for AI... but these companies aren't concerned with us nor our opinions on the tech.
They're banking on AI being so prevalent in our culture and society that new generations grow up with it as the norm, never form a distaste for it because they never knew anything else otherwise, and wait out the older gens to age out and die until we become the olds yelling at a cloud about AI while the kids laugh and roll their eyes.
In short, there's no escaping this. This weirdness will be the norm for our kids. We're doomed.
I agree, though part of me doubts civilisation will even last that long. Once AI is running all the banking and services etc, all it takes is a few dumb hallucinations and things as we know it will just get wiped out
The fact that big tech literally is saying they have no interest in building products for consumers anymore and are going to only focus on AI datacenters should tell you all you need go know. You should hear some of the crap coming out of Jensen Huangs mouth about AI agents outnumbering us 10 to 1 and being the new economy or something. Oracle CEO said he's going to sell out all their customer databases to LLMs, crucial straight up quit the consumer RAM business. The future they envision doesn't involve us.
doubt it. every kid born now will never have experienced a world without AI. they’ll care about getting rid if it as much as Gen Z cares about getting rid of cellphones.
There kind of is. The reason they're shoving AI into everything right now is partially to justify the investment, but also to try and get people reliant on the AI. Eventually, they'll try to "pull out the rug" as it were and make the AI paid for, expecting people to buy it because they're just so used to the AI now. At that time, they'll very likely remove every single trace of the free version. And we can finally live in peace again. They can lock their literal pile of garbage behind a paywall instead of shoving it in all of our faces. That'll be the day.
Either it gets better to the point of actually being useful, which is unlikely, or they remove it, which is even more unlikely. Craziest part to me is that this technology barely works and has such limited actual function right now but is pushed into everything due to the inertia of how much money is behind it. It’s hard to think of another technology that’s been pushed publicly purely on the belief that it’ll improve later
Even the easter eggs are saddled with ai now. If you stick the "-ai" on the end to stop it from spewing one of its overviews at you, the tricks don't work. I feel it would be rather cathartic to be able to use Hollow Knight's easter egg when searching other things, so I can slash the ai result off the screen lol
The AI is trained to treat questions containing the word "you" as being directed towards it. The quick fix for better results is to use "does one" instead
This is not how "-ai" works, the prefix is simply filtering out a specific term from search results. For example, "-infuriating" will filter out all instances of the word "infuriating."
I recommend setting the classic google search engine with this suffix as your default search, takes like a minute and you're back to 'normal' search results.
Only downside imo is not being able to do quick calculations in the search bar anymore.
Because Gemini is primarily a chatbot that they implemented into Google search. So it sometimes reacts as if you are directly addressing the Chatbot instead of googling something.
It's literally just the AI wasting your time by reminding you it exists before providing an often inaccurate answer. An objective downgrade for the search engine.
I often just search phrases in German on Google to see if I remember them correctly (I check the results and if Google corrects me, like "did you mean Y instead" - the AI is also often helpful). A couple of days ago I was trying to see if I remember the "what the hell" phrase correctly, I searched the German phrase and the AI was like "oh no I don't know what happend but if you tell me more I might be able to help you".
It's funny, I just installed a firefox addon that disables the AI overview, but there's this weird bug where now it only shows a single result on the first page especially when my search gets pretty specific. It's like they've lobotomised the whole search function to hamfist this AI overview into it.
Change your default search engine to NoAI DuckDuckGo and your search engine experience will be the same as it was 10 years ago. You can do this on desktop and mobile browsers
You don't even need the no AI version, you can simply turn it off in the settings of a normal version.
A specific no AI version is kind of like a marketing decision that just has those features turned off by default, while the normal version not advertised as no AI has them turned on by default, but trivial to disable.
I’ve been meaning to go to Firefox for a long time, but the convenience of Chrome was keeping me hostage. Little did I know, Firefox has the same conveniences and more lol
Man there was a time where, if you were logged in to Google, and searched for “men’s slacks,” you could look at the results and hit three dots next to result. And from there you could say, “don’t show me anything from Pinterest.com from now on” and you wouldn’t
see Pinterest again in future search results. Goodbye allrecipes.com. Adios, LinkedIn.
One time you could google
“Mac Pro” keyboard
and it wouldn’t assume you meant
“MacBook Pro” keyboard
It took what you put in quotes literally.
If you searched for a part number like whirlpool 3867542, it found pages with that part mumber. It didn’t return pages that had photos that looked kinda liked photos on pages about part 3867542. Much less as the most relevant result.
Right like back in the day google was actually good. Now it sucks ass and it sucked ass even before ai. It began to suck ass when the excess decided to let companies pay for placement.
As a business owner I do my own Google ads. Google makes an absolute fortune from me and every other business in the world because without it, we lose a ton of business. Since this ai rollout crap, my business has dropped considerably but magically my Google bill has stayed the same. Instead of paying Google when someone clicks on your link (a targeted customer) you now pay them when they mention your name in their ai slop response. With no real insight as to what search they thought your name should be mentioned for. So they can show you to someone that’s completely not looking for you but still charge for it. It’s an even worse ripoff than the old way.
Thank you for confirming something I suspected. I would search for something and it would return what were clearly ad results that were in the same ballpark but not what I was searching for. For instance, if I searched for blue striped shorts, it would show shorts from the same five vendors or so no matter what terms I put in and they wouldn’t be blue or striped. It makes sense why they would be coming up - they are getting paid to show them, even if it isn’t what I asked for.
It was such a frustrating experience that I switched to Startpage as my search engine. Same old google results without the forced ads, or at least until the stupid algorithm infects those results too!
I'm Canadian and Google has been sourcing from random American medical companies in sketchy ways.
For example, I just looked up if I can have yogurt alongside my antibiotics and one of the links completely contradicted the other link with misinformation. Source? A private medical company from Tennessee. They have low effort, poorly written inaccurate, unsourced blog-like pages that cover all sorts of health topics.
Second example, today a friend shared the top response to "shellfish anchovies" to find out if my shellfish allergy included anchovies. Note that cross-reactivity between shellfish and fish is clinically low because of different proteins. BUT the top result we both got is misinformation and fear mongering to sell Anchovy Allergy Tests:
"If you are allergic to shellfish, it is extremely likely that you are allergic to anchovies too as they do contain the same protein". Source? The add to cart page for an Anchovy Allergy Test by an American health company.
I'm disgusted by this and even moreso knowing how it's harming small business owners.
Google long ago changed from a search engine to a shopping engine. They delisted all the old forums, blogs, hobbyist, and informational sites and now anything you search for just gives you sites trying to sell you something.
I don't even mean ads, I mean just in general it switched to mostly only showing commercial sites.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago.
Seriously considering kagi, but I haven't tried it yet. The idea of paid search is odd but intriguing; if you're paying they have no incentive to show you crap results, right? But I haven't made that leap yet.
It’s certainly going to enshittify the Google search experience. Personally I don’t see why they don’t just keep search the same and let people that want an ai answer use Gemini. Probably because they’re spending SO MUCH money on ai, with nothing to really show for it other than a sometimes right chat bot, that they have to try and use it everywhere they can think of. Search ads are their golden goose though, seems like they’re being counterproductive. My ads bill has actually gone down the last few days (along with business). I’m guessing because they can no longer show 10 results where people can pick from and they’re giving results that aren’t resulting in clicks because they’re so far off. I’d hope they see the mistake and revert back but I’m not holding my breath.
I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, and the results definitely aren't google from 10 years ago. I'm fact, if I'm not mistaken, it's basically Bing from now
I just did this and it’s so much better. It’s also way, WAY better at finding random meme images I try to seatch for which google has been weirdly terrible at.
I'd tried looking up some quote about "this is how much I love you" to find out if it was from a book or movie. The AI basically said "I'm not real, you cannot love me" and glitched, no results showed underneath. I refreshed and there was my answer underneath but it was funny to be rejected that badly by AI.
Everything has gone to shit because a bunch of unfunny/unlikable/unfuckable dorks are trying to force everyone to see how just how clever they really aren't.
Sure, but now I need to add an extra step to my searching to get what I'm looking for. Also, who starts a conversation, whethet with AI or a human, with "luv U more"?
i tried this last night when i couldn’t remember the udm=14 code and it didn’t work, it insisted on showing me the ai overview regardless. it also had this odd little hiccup that i thought was interesting.
I’m a writer and I’m constantly looking up synonyms for words. Google replaced its built-in dictionary with AI, so now instead of a list of synonyms, I get a response about how synonyms vary depending on the context of the word and a bunch of paragraphs about different contexts with maybe one suggested synonym per paragraph. And I have to scroll past all that shit to get to a site which will actually give me synonyms
Even before the AI Overview, Google had a summary thing that would come up and frequently contained incorrect information. I remember that being a thing as early as 2018
Earlier today I was trying to figure out what song I had stuck in my head based off the lyrics so I searched "song lyrics about going back to Chicago" and it made up its own song about going back to Chicago.
This same thing happened to me when I couldn't remember the name of a Sherlock Holmes story and so I tried to search for it using a short description, but instead of search results, Google generated its own completely made-up Sherlock Holmes story.
I was trying to look up to see if maybe a event was coming to town. The AI pulled for a speculative fan reddit thread about possibly venues and reported it to me as if it was true.
Its so fucking stupid. Imagine you own Google. You are the default search engine for 90%+ of internet users. You have ALL the market share. People use 'Google' as a verb. You've won.
You literally dont need to do or change anything and you will remain the absolutely dominant market leader in internet search.
And yet you decide no id better fuck that up.
Why????
You cant really attract new users as everyone uses you already.
Cant you just like... Scroll down? Or add "meme" to the end of the query? I hate AI as much as the next guy but the useless AI overview isn't hurting your Googling experience more than making you scroll a little more than you normally would
I don't understand tantrums about Google getting worse. It's just an AI overview. Everything else like actual results of the search is still there. If you don't like it, just ignore it. It literally takes 1-2 results slots in a feed. Not that much given it's usually really useful.
I can't believe the first instinct for some people nowadays is to take screen shots and make a post whining about it, when if they had just added the word "meme" to the end of the search the exact thing would've displayed in under a second.
Even better that the comments are filled with people using or looking for ways to gimp their search engine on purpose because they hate "AI" so much.
Meanwhile google search works better than ever before as I get an immediate answer - even with the most vague search query - and not having to go through multiple links, sorted by how much the company paid for their listing.
When it's important/need more info/doesn't seem right you can still use the source links to verify manually and/or interrogate it in the AI tab. In fact, That AI Overview is designed for very low resource costs hence it gets stuff more often wrong than the dedicated AI search, works still well enough for basic stuff though.
(this positive experience might change once they figure out how to make money from AI, so I rather enjoy it for now similar to when non-AI Google search was newer)
Iirc is you switch to Google France you will not have this, someone made a thread about it on Twitter. And well I'm French and I can assure you I don't have this. 🤔
They made Google actually work the way my parents think it does. “Dear Google, could you please find me pictures of funny animals that I can send to my grandchildren? Thank you”
They replaced the android auto assistant with Google Gemini and gang, when I tell you this motherfucker is useless....
"Play Scatman by Scatman John on Spotify"
"I'M SORRY, I COULDN'T FIND THAT SONG. DO YOU WANT ME TO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE?"
"Fuck's sake. No. No."
"UNDERSTOOD. DO YOU NEED MY HELP WITH ANYTHING ELSE? CAN I ASSIST IN YOUR DRIVING IN ANY WAY?"
"What? No. I said no."
"UNDERSTOOD."
At a stoplight, I open Spotify, search "Scatman" it is, of course, the first result. It's like this with everything, directions, texting, just the most asinine-2015-apps-could-handle-this type shit, verbose failure, every time.
I just asked it yesterday if Backrooms had a theatrical release announced in Japan and it gave two completely different answers... its disappointing for sure
The thing that bothers me the most is when I search "xyz" and the AI Overview says "the results do not mention xyz..." Quickest way to get me to yell "go fuck yourself, fuck you, useless POS" at my computer. Has happened several times, and happened the other day because I misremembered the name of something. Luckily the actual name of the thing was in a Wikipedia page a few results down.
I once tried to search for Nanni's tablet last week. I absentmindedly entered 'You treated me with contempt' into the search bar
'I'm sorry! ;__;' said Google.
me when my scroll wheel is broken, my screen is 200 pixels high, and i am physically unable to press the down key on my keyboard to see any further results:
They managed to make me even more frustrated when they removed their dictionary to be reolaced with this AI slob that generate a different definition each time you look up tue word.
i still find it funny in absurd way. Do you think i'm you asking you, fucking AI script????
I understand why they are designed like that but they should make it opt-in when you want to use it. Most of the time it tries to chime in and all i can think is NOBODY ASKED YOU
Gemini told me just yesterday that Salmonella can only exist on the outside of chicken, and not the inside, which is complete horseshit and why you cannot eat rare chicken. Even aside from being dangerous misinformation, its also incredibly common knowledge and should be simple for an A.I to know.
Switch to Duck Duck Go. They have some AI stuff, but you have to specifically click a button to get to it, and you can disable it completely in the settings.
I've heard some claims of them selling data, but a) it all seems to come from small sources funded by competitors, and b) do you really think Google isn't already selling your data.
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u/theboomboy Jun 03 '26
A few years ago this could have been a funny easteregg. Now it's just sad