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Death by AI

(davebarry.substack.com)
583 points ano-ther | 1 comments | 19 Jul 25 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jwr ◴[19 Jul 25 21:33 UTC] No.44619638[source]▶
I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and there is usually no way to correct it. Various "feedback" forms are mostly ignored.

I had to fight a similar battle with Google Maps, which most people believe to be a source of truth, and it took years until incorrect information was changed. I'm not even sure if it was because of all the feedback I provided.

I see Google as a firehose of information that they spit at me ("feed"), they are too big to be concerned about any inconsistencies, as these don't hurt their business model.

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muglug ◴[19 Jul 25 22:04 UTC] No.44619848[source]▶
No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered your question.

Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that’s cheap enough to run on webpage text for every search result.

That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a search for "Suicide Squad" yields

> The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of "Suicide Squad"

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weatherlite ◴[20 Jul 25 04:13 UTC] No.44621904[source]▶
> That was a product decision, and a very bad one.

I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it. Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search business and had to respond.

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bee_rider ◴[20 Jul 25 04:54 UTC] No.44622096{3}[source]▶
They are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying garbage. If that’s the plan… actually, it might be brilliant.
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1. weatherlite ◴[20 Jul 25 06:57 UTC] No.44622619{4}[source]▶
I can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite strong.