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Never mind kids, I’ve largely started asking Claude any nontrivial questions that I used to Google. It’s night and day the difference.
Yes if you search anything in Google, you typically get sites that have a cookie panel, ask to allow notifications, show "Login With Google" popover taking the keyboard focus, and lot of ads before you can even read the content. No wonder people do not want to use Google anymore.
To be honest, that's the fault of the websites themselves. Google is just an amplifier of a world web wide problem.
While true, google can punish them by ranking the offending sites lower than non offending ones.
I think we can blame google for the login with google prompts given they provide an SDK for that exact use case.
It's symbiotic. Google has been aggregating data from these websites for years to serve as summaries in search, reducing traffic to the sites. More pernicious is AMP, where the site is basically copied to the Google server. This force websites to use AdSense and structure the content in certain ways. If a site doesn't want to use AdSense, or allow Google to summarise the site, it gets down-ranked in search. A death sentence. Further, Google's algorithms routinely promote spam because this is most profitable for Google. Hiding the important information 3/4 of the way down a 10,000 word article with a hundred different kinds of ads on the page. Since the "good" websites have to compete with these spam websites, they either adapt or give up monetisation.
One of the more horrifying stories to read was about [Code Yellow back in 2019.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurr...) Google's algorithms were getting too good. Users were finding what they wanted too fast. They'd type in their query, the first result was good, then the user would close the tab. For Google, this meant less ad revenue. They wanted users to stay on Google for longer. *So they chose to degrade the algorithm quality.* Users would have to click multiple links to find the information they wanted, and inside every link was ads served by Google. This is one of the pivotal moments in one of the worst cases of enshitification in software history.
For most things, it's the same with Gemini and it is faster.
The other day I found that one old game of which I originally caught just a glimpse and remembered only a fragment of what one voice actor was saying is in fact Lords of Magic.
I attempted to google this a few years ago to no avail.
I use Kagi Assistant. It doesn't just give a summary, it is more like a personal "Googler"/web surfer. I feel like I'm involved in the process.
My coworkers use Google and often quote back the AI summary me instead of checking the source and referring to that. It's scary seeing even those with higher education behave like this.
Very skeptical - the source material is
If GenAI = LLMs then ChatGPT made public release in October 2022 which gives precisely zero time to generate data on impact in students. Also
Really? 173 peer reviewed studies based on this niche in less than 3 years. I shudder to think the quality of those constituent studies. Not questioning the results just the means of getting them.
I barely use Google Search for anything anymore.
It was garbage before LLMs got good, and the deep thinking models leapfrog whatever it used to be in its heydey.
This days you don't relly click those links much. Most of the time its the Google AI Mode all the way down.
AI is my default for just about any search now. From today:
How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof? It seems to have been dreamed out of nowhere
Why are there advertisements for a shampoo containing caffeine? Does caffeine do something useful other than when you drink it?
What happens in sense and sensibility?
All of them give a decent answer, with the ability to ask follow ups. Eg, how does S&S compare with Pride and Prejudice? What about more recent novels connecting romantic choices with economic choices?
All of them give you links to source material, in case you suspect they are just making it up.
At the start of the millennium, Google search changed everything about how I look for information. Now it seems outdated.
Somehow reminds me of the journalist who convinced LLMs to consider him a "sausage eating champion" with just 20 minutes of work [0].
Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there, e.g. "Nutris(c) is proven to be better than caffeine for haircare"
I wonder how well a company could establish something like Danone's health-claim for Activia [1] in an AI without ever being clearly accountable for it...
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2010/12/...
I seem to recall headlines about Russia infecting AIs with propaganda, one or two years ago.
I don't remember actually reading the article, so I have no idea how serious that was, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't being studied actively by all major countries already. And that may be one of the core reasons for the China vs US AI competition.
Israel also did so. But most of it seems to get filtered out pretty well. the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area.
Which makes it perfect for companies to create an area where they own the majority of material, and "have the AI talk for them".
e.g. how Philip Morris defined their e-cig "Heets" as a separate product to (e-)cigarettes because it doesn't burn tobacco but only "heats" it. It's now a separate domain with the majority of material (including the term "heets") owned by Philip Morris.
"Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there…"
Or, you know, buy their way to the top of a search engine's results.
Regarding the first linked article: wouldn't it be the same with no AI in sight? I suppose most people, when they'd stumbled upon a blog written by "a senior technology journalist at the BBC", would believe in the sausage eating championship too.
To be clear: I totally agree that manipulating LLMs is super-dangerous. I don't think it is a 20 minutes of work, though. It's more like "years of building credibility, and then 20 minutes of work".
It's interesting — "knowing how to search" used to be a skill. One wouldn't search for "How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof?", but rather "cantor diagonal proof origin". You would see "normies" searching and wanted to bang your head against the wall seeing them searching like they're talking.
But seems like they won? Why know how to search when you can simply ask your question. You can even tyipe it layke dat and it would still work.
I would argue this was always a bit silly, and mostly due to UI shortcomings of search platforms. The fact you needed to add "magic" params to shape the results speaks volumes. Any UI that fundamentally tries to reshape how you are expect to interact, or impose certain "behavior" is wrong. This is also why we are using touch instead of a stylus.
AI won because they took the paradigm of presenting a new way of doing something in a familiar way. An LLM works very similarly how you would ask a knowledgeable friend, and google worked similarly how an engineer would query a database.
But today neither of your search phrases will give any useful results on google search, while LLMs get it right once in a while.
This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.
But seeing disney+ now go all ads for all tiers just shows that's the way they arc bends. Eventually AI will take over and when it does, it will then turn into the shittiest shit ad-infused service the world has ever known.
Nothing has changed, though. In my office the ones that have really boosted productivity are the ones putting in the effort to craft solid prompts and understand when to move that slider on reasoning effort and model selection. Or understand and put thought into how to leverage the tool, like project folders with the context to all or part of your job the model can reference. Everyone else throws a lazy prompt at the default 'instant' model, gets a crap response and then they give up.
I definately see value in getting tailored plausalbe answers without applying much effort, except effort, struggle and experimentation are required for learning and understanding.
I found that I can't really trust this knowledge becuase I skipped the source and didn't conclude it myself. Like how I can learn anything when being spoon fed with conclusions and summaries without accessing the source?
I've spent way too many hours of my life learning to spot SEO and moving on. I'm not defending LLMs, I'm condemning search. It's shit and has been for a decade or so.
I'm willing to bet that approximately 0% of users know when to suspect it being made up and then check the sources.
Ditto with results from Google search.
(And here I thought "Alice in Wonderland" was a Disney film—who knew it was a book first?)
Did you read all the links?
Google search did the same and more than once the link didn’t contain what I searched for
Agree, I've been bypassing search engines for a year now (hint: not a young user either).
Advertising killed search.
While I still use search engines I can't fault anyone from relying on the AI features in Google, rather than the search, as that's clearly not working anymore. Unless you're looking for something rather specific you're going the get drowned in SEO spam and ads. We're back at you having to be a bit of a wizard to trick Google into finding stuff for you anymore.
I don't really like LLMs or AI assisted tools, but I think they are really good for "explain this configuration, tell me what it does, and link to the documentation". Then read the AI summary, verify with the actual docs and go from there. It's almost always the easier path to understanding, for me at least.
How long until adverts are injected into LLMs?
will you ever know?
Watermarking, contextually biasing llms to output specific tokens, can be rather easily usurped for ads.
The advertiser can buy logit "boosts" to specific tokens in a given context (the more preceding context, the cheaper). Once an activation has happened, dont do it again for the session.
The LLM will end up pushing a specific product contextual to the conversation. It just needs this slight nudge at the logit level to start talking about it and will fill in the rest.
If you follow these a good portion do not contain the claims that the AI output links to. This is obviously a hard problem since actual AI "knowledge" lies deep in the weights somewhere.
But LLMs are getting pretty good at convincing you. By using AI you are basically being fed information. It may be accurate now, but you are losing the ability to compare results. Not only that but I would argue you are also losing critical thinking skills
Well, if Google search actually returned anything useful, other than the SEO-rigged trash and AI generated slop it pushes forward as results to queries, then there would be a reason to actually use Google.
For the time being, AI seems to be doing a much better job in most cases, so as we say: So long Google!
This is going to be an unstable equilibrium as everyone tries to work out how to do AI-SEO.
Mind you much of the existence of Google has been this kind of unstable arms race, from the early days of the ad-free home page to introducing pagerank as the first attempt against linkspam SEO.
Most teachers now use AI for lesson planning (talk to any teacher). Some even for marking when they can.
Children probably use more critical thinking in the playground and interacting with other children than in class, because classwork is mostly slop anyway.
LLMs are not going to one shot answers in Minecraft through the chat UI. Possibly a more effective resource than checkbox activities at teaching "critical thinking" (abused term in education).
I have talked to teachers recently about their options when choosing classroom curriculum and tools. None of them have said a word about AI. Most of them have complained of lack of autonomy because the tools and curriculum are decided at the district level, and the teachers have to use whatever the district sets up.
The reason I started those conversations was specifically around when children are learning critical thinking skills. When we broke down exactly what types of exercises teach those skills, it surprised me to find that it starts way earlier than it used to. It is now a late elementary school topic, when it used to be high school.
That doesn't mean that slop isn't creeping into the classroom - it is. But what to do about it is a completely different conversation when it is pushed down from on top vs. assuming teachers are choosing it.
Depends on what we mean by critical thinking, as I said it is an abused term. Some just use it as a substitute to mean "thinking for yourself" when that is not something taught in a lesson but either becomes a habit or doesn't. But even then we all use arguments from authority and present it as our own because you are not realistically going to think about everything from first principles all the time.
I agree that districts do have a lot of pressure on teachers to keep pushing up test scores which leads them to being gamed either by teachers or children no matter the tools available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The non overreacting take is probably that young people will still have plenty of interaction with parents and their peers etc to develop critical thinking as a guard against deception and whatever else. Definitely some low single digit people without a social support system around them will develop AI psychosis though.
If only media literacy wasn't in such short supply these days among parents and peers.
Even Google itself is now just asking AI. Usually the AI summary Google returns is more useful than the links. I get really annoyed when I query something and no AI summary is given as the links it returns these days are trash.
Ironically because most of the results are just pages of AI-written SEO fluff. At least the Google AI summary gets to the point.
We're just going to have to cope with the fact that AI has very nearly completed its endeavor to Mr. Frundles the entire internet.
Googling itself lacks credibility. Most of the results are plastered with Google ads. And since Google ads mostly skip any kind of review process, there are a lot of bad ads.
Recently my friend took out her phone and started googling by pecking virtual keyboard. It felt like a throwback to times long gone. Something akin to pulling out a walkman and decisively pushing in a mechanical button to start the playback.
Is this ironic or serious? As opposed to what? Typing it into a Chatbot? Speech input? I use commercial and self-hosted AI as well as (meta-)search engines, RAG, books, journals and whatever else I can get my hands on to search/learn. Neither is useless or old-fashioned and it’s great to be able to approach the goal from more and more angles that can complement each other. As for mode of interaction: For many things, I’m so much faster and more fluent when typing and reading that I don’t bother with speech.
Somehow a homemade problem for Google.
I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.
But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...
For quick reference, sometimes it’s pretty good! The problem is that obviously you can’t dedicate a lot of compute or additional tools for checking those answers so most of it can’t really be trusted.
And yet they is not how it is used, and is trusted beyond sanity.
A quick reference shouldn't require me to have to check the quick reference for hallucinations.
Not mention that this changes how information is found and how it is created.
The sometimes convenience comes alongside ejecting society from the previous system of figuring out what is true and false.
That was a system that was already failing, but we may have gotten on top of. Now we have one that is simply alien and inimical to any human scale solutions to staying ahead of it.
Generation capacity simply outstrips verification capacity, and with search summaries taking over links to the actual sites, the funding/incentives to run sites and publish content is removed.
The curtain call of the era of the open internet, and the opening act of the LLM mediated web, isn’t a show I am excited to have front row seats to.
Google's search AI clearly trades accuracy for speed and it shows. It frequently draws the exact opposite conclusions from the sources it references.
"Somehow a homemade problem for Google."
Wow, I thought you were going to talk about selling ads and how that has made search shite.
Google always sold ads. Google weren't always shite, though.
They, themselves, sorta proved that a good product could become dominant with ads and without being shite.
well, Selling ads in general wasn't a problem 15 years ago.
The pre-AI enshitification-part where they realized that worse search-results means more searches so more ad-revenue is another story.
If they wouldn't have done that, they could be the proof that a well-maintained search-engine is still better than a LLM.
But now this will never happen, as no-one will be willing to give up that additional search revenue while overall usage is going down...
Or degrading their keyword operators to be more mobile friendly
It’s a “solved” problem. On more dubious topics, “proper articles” these days also more often than not come from AI clusters, so you might as well just read the Google one.
AI is becoming the access path to the internet content the way internet became access path to writing, audio and video.
well, if you let the quality of your search results go down, people will look for alternative.s
Case study of 1, way above 18 - usually my search is - please research/find this in chatgpt. Google really need to fix the quality of their output and ranking.
Well, we ditched books for Google with unknown consequences. Let people work how they want.
The same discourse happened when Google appeared.
"you should not google, you should use a web directory, you will get exposed to a more diverse set of sites, not just what google pre-digested for you"
"you should not google, you should go to a library and search in physical media instead, google is for lazy people who can't think for themselves"
I used Google when it appeared, and I'm pretty sure that I never heard these sentences uttered out. If anything, everybody was wowed by PageRank.
It was actually the entire internet. It didn't matter what the search engine came back with, anything on the internet was suspect.
Then it was Wikipedia. Since anyone could update it, anything on Wikipedia was suspect.
Now even though Claude seems smarter than any person I interact with on a daily basis, it is all suspect.
Then there is the opposite with arxiv. Anything on arxiv is not just true but has authority in an argument, automatically. Everything besides papers on reproducibility. Those are basically ignored.
Epistemology is not our strong point.
I distinctly remember statements and discussions like that from way back when. Not just relating to google but around whatever the new search engine of the day was (however, I do agree that the sentiment around PageRank was mostly positive).
I don't think that's true, because google (and other search engines) were primarily about pointing you to sources which could give you an answer, not providing the answer directly.
Top of Google’s page is just a worse version of AI, followed by three or four sponsored result, then SEO optimized crap and finally what I’m looking for is probably near bottom of the results page- I’m not surprised at young people ditching Google
Is this surprising? Google has been returning poor results for a long time.
Their moat is that you don't need to log in or something.
On the bright side, they're probably less subject to advertisement then when using "free" search agents
OpenAI has hit $1bil in annualized revenue since launching ads in February. AI search optimization is already a thing. I don't see much of a reason to assume they aren't already getting served information coming from what's essentially advertisements/sponsored content.
Funny enough, I believe when SEO pivots to prioritizing Ai, Google results will get better again. Currently there is probably no way Google can tune their search that won't be gamed by SEO abusers.
It'll likely be too late by then—the internet will have "died".
(Is it dead yet?)
for a huge amount of "non tech-people", the thing is:
- they mainly look at the first Google result and sometimes if it looks "not convincing" the next few. Especially on a phone where the screen space will cut out most results without scrolling.
- a lot of them write (partial) questions instead of "search queries"
- the first result is an AI response which is very good at being "convincing looking" even if it's plain wrong. (And the others they might look at are nearly guaranteed bought.)
soooo
I don't think much changes for most people.
Sure Google Search AI response links some sources (but not many and it's not that rare for them to not really be sources for the _full_ answer...).
But so do (some) AI agents.
Through the naivety with which I see people trusting AI is very scary.
This makes me wonder if following statement:
is a side effect of the studies using sub-par methodology or if I have some observation bias.
Like the problem is many people filer trust by "who they ask", "if the question is hard", "if people might have a reason to lie". But the problem is AI works so differently that you can't trust it in _any_ question, even causal questions where (close to) no westerner(^1) would consider lying to you and everyone would either know they don't know or have the right answer...
(^1): Some cultures for "politeness" reasons value "giving a answer" over "saying I don't know", especially if the person won't see you again. That is getting much better AFIK in such cultures but can be a problem when e.g. asking for the way...
Nice presupposition in the headline that children using Google® is the good, safe and natural order of things and that using AI is bad, scary and dangerous
Nice presupposition in the headline that children using Google® is the good, safe and natural order of things. Using AI must be bad, scary and dangerous
Beautiful. I shall consider suffixing every random observation I have or action I take with that, for an extra infusion of ominosity and importance.
I use LLMs every day as a search engine replacement, but I’m concerned about this because there’s a vast gulf of capabilities between different models, or even the same models with different reasoning depths.
Back in the day everyone had essentially the same Google, and there was no concept of paying to get better search results. But now the average family is going to rely on the ad-ridden ChatGPT Free tier which is more likely to be wrong, less in depth, with additional commercial incentives. It’s only a minority of adults now that pays for frontier models, and how many are letting their children have access?
You can see this divide right now with medical advice for instance. If you have access to ChatGPT 6 Pro (only available for the $100/month tier I think), it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer that likely reflects the latest medical consensus, while a casual user relying on Google AI might be told to eat toilet paper to relieve constipation: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1wmbn87/a_pt_show...
i only do so when activating deep research. and that is not worth it for many search requests. i dont trust AI to find what i am looking for.
or in the case of gemini, if it even looked at all...
Google itself isn't great either. It's biased by google's interests. The fact that users don't have control over how documents are retrieved is a problem and hopefully everybody understand why google's results keep getting worse.
If I'm understanding correctly, each calls to a LLM makes a 3000W GPU run at full speed during the time of inference (let's say from 5 to 60 sec) while Google searches are historically mostly cached so very inexpensive for most searches.
Isn't the environmental impact 10 to 100 times what we were used to?
To be honest, the only way to make it more efficient is to use it more, creating an economic incentive to improve the system as a whole. The cognitive impact on future generations is far more important than that.
Well, if Google Search was an experience where it would show you the most relevant page to your query, they would probably still be in the market. However, so many adversarial efforts, SEO, scam, ads, etc have been put in place that plain Google search is practically worthless for everyday use; they shouldn't be surprised that people jumped at the next best opportunity to replace it.
It’s because raw search has become unusable. Google in particular. Lately I’ve been getting cases where the actual search doesn’t even load (even with a page refresh)…just the AI summary which sometimes fails and rest of page load fails with it. So it’s either AI or bing