Google's new AI mode is good, actually

My main takeaway is that Google's AI efforts are still playing catch-up in the mindshare race even if they've long since caught up with or surpassed OpenAI technically. A huge number of people who are heavy users of ChatGPT or Claude may have never tried Gemini.

A huge number of people that use Google Docs and other products daily are trying really hard to avoid using it in spite of it being rammed down their throats to the point that leaving Google starts to look like a viable option. Oh, and of course you do pay for it even if you don't use it and never plan to use it.

Yeah, I changed my primary search engine to DuckDuckGo when Google started forcing incorrect AI results down my throat.

I kind of think of them as the thing that pops up when you try googling something. A lot of people have probably come across that.

i think they are shooting themselves in the foot by automatically including results from a quite dumb model in google search

I chanted it when I realized that bad search results were not a lost fight against SEO, but intention. That made me try other search engines ... and both bing and duckduckgo are better.

I just want to be able to decide where when and how I use particular tools. I don't think 'left leaning' has anything to do with it, and I find this a weird connection to make.

If it serves as proof that that is not relevant I am purely thinking about this in a professional context, not in a private one.

I have Userscripts setup to hide the AI mode buttons and other AI results.

Also in Google docs, gmail and so on?

I don't use those on my computer, so I guess I haven't run into it there. My setup is mostly for Google search and YouTube on both mobile safari and macOS Safari. For YouTube, I have hidden the shorts, community posts and any videos with less than 1000 views (almost always AI generated slop).

It's the contemporary "I don't even own a TV"

Good stuff. If you are sharing it anywhere a pointer would be appreciated. I've already done as much as I can without spending a week hacking up scripts and I'm game for anything that will improve this further.

> cultural purity test among left-leaning people

Calm down with taking the rhetoric to 11, and don't project some sort of simple left/right numberline on this.

Sometimes a little personal experience-based clearly anecdotal talk is okay. Hacker News isn’t some scientific journal, and yes, I too know one leftie in my circle that hates AI models and zero right wingers who feel that way… Do you have any anecdotal evidence to the contrary?

Strongly agreed. I think this is a large part of the reason behind dissonance of opinions on AI usefulness we see even here: unless you are intentional about it, your main experience with AI is that of non-SOTA or budget versions of the models.

What makes it worse is that even if you are intentional and are willing to pay, it doesn't help everywhere. Gemini as voice assistant defaults to Flash and there is no choice to change it, even though the speed of the faster model hardly matters here, while accuracy does. Same with AI suggestions everywhere, and other such "ambient" features.

The flip site of being intentional about always using SOTA models, is that you notice when you are not getting them.

IME Gemini has a lot more non-tech mindshare than Claude. For tech it's of course the opposite.