Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.

It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.

I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.

Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?

Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms

What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?

the isolation I see in the United States

Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)

Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)

Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement.

Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone.

But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..

It really does depend on the country. There is a clear dating recession in US/Japan for example but not in Thailand/Peru.

I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.

And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.

I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.

Surely there's a big selection bias here.

You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.

Yup, and this is my age range. I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least. But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.

you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends". a real friend is essentially a platonic partner, and most people are lucky if they develop even one such friendship in their lifetime. I've lost one to distance and another to marriage, so even though I have "friends", I consider myself to be in the 1/5 too.

Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.

I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.

Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.

Those also read the exact same to me, unless you mean to imply the latter also includes 'being an knobhead to the person you're asking'.

I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)

Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.

https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...

There's also some detailed stats for the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...

Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.

The idea that you would consider your friend a buzzkill because they used IMDB is the type of nightmare fuel social anxiety is made of.

You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.

I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.

It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”

It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too.

Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed.

Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...

Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.

I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.

* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.

This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.

Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.

Wikimedia's entry:

https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...

literally says it meets standards and all the items green? is there a leaderboard somewhere you're referring to?

edit: s/the board/all the items/ for clarity

non-profit

While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"

You could ask AI for the best charity to donate to

How does that work? How can they buy into a non-profit?

It's an intriguing idea though, it would be cool to see more non-profits being supported. Non-profit doesn't have to mean being terrible and inefficient.

You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.

If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.

Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?

Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.

I use a reputable email provider (Mailbox.org) and my emails often end up in the spam of Gmail users.

Not so bad for a single person. But once you start being an email provider, you get bad actors using your service to send spam emails. Which can cause all of your sending ips to blacklisted at once.

I have a few qualms with this response:

1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.

2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.

3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?

Is RLHF the best approach? It’s not how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, famously. “Customers don’t know what they want” “A faster horse” etc…

I doubt it, but it makes sycophantic managers feel good to see it serve up the same BS they spew.

You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!

These models are incapable of saying they don't know, because they have no concept of knowing. They simply predict the next word which is most likely.

Typical exchange:

Me: "You bastard."

Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."

The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.

An interesting conspiracy theory, as long as you're honest about what it is.

Yup. I'm most familiar with Jill Lepore and Quinn Slobodian (and others in their respective orbits). They're both historians who've written extensively about Musk and Muskism (et al). Wild stuff.

Apparently the plan is to use AI slop, mediated thru social medias, to defeat the woke mind virus, perpetuated by the Anti-Christ, in order to safe guard humanity's future.

I wish I was making this up.

The more simple explanation is that the current government in power is over exposed in their AI investment. The normal conservative mainstream media was already doing a great job of propagandizing older populations.

Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?

This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.

Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.

Typical example:

"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"

You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.

"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."

Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.

"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."

I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.

"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."

I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.

"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."

Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.

(ad nauseam)

I have one google account where gemini constantly confidently hallucinates crap, and another where it doesn't (at least to the extent that other modern LLMs don't).

I take this to mean that my one account has been mistaken for a competitor and they're trying to poison its data. But who knows.

Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.

I experienced this the other month. I searched for some safety data on something at the same time as my wife and we were effectively given extremely conflicting information about what to do by Google. Just a few tweaks in wording and different advertising profiles and Google will serve up opposite realities it seems.

Not OP, but if I’m not interested in using Google’s AI, it’s going to just return these weird bad results that it’d be better off if Google just didn’t even include them as they’re factually wrong?

I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.

My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?

Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.

I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.

Google will stop being a traditional search engine because they believe they’ve found a more profitable version of it.

One where their users don’t go off to other sites and where they can keep shoving ads in their face.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

And it's going to get worse over time (kinda like how Google search results got worse over time) as ads get introduced and people try to game the ai response. General purpose AI chatbots are a waste.

Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?

First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.

Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM

Lessons learned from Microslop

Change is hard.

I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.

I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.

Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=really%2C+just+shut+up -> "Understood. I will stop talking right now."

I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.

  You look at me, you've got nothing left to say

  I moan and pout at you until I get my way

  I won't dance, you won't sing

  I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring

  Well, there's nothing I can do
  I only wanna be with you
  You can call me your fool
  I only wanna be with you

If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?

This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?

It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)

AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.

You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.

Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period.

As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.

Another one that to me is equally impressive: instant glues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate

The first thorough research went into them when looking for new clear plastics, and this route of making them was ruled out because it would rather stick to everything than ease the production of objects with nice optical properties. The story goes, it was so annoying to work with that it was initially shelved, and only years after being considered again and ruled out again for a different project, the utility of its reliable and fast bonding was fully appreciated.

The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.

Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.

Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?

always the same response: "you're holding it wrong"

I'm going to agree and disagree.

I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.

I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.

I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.

New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

Its also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"

Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:

Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"

But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was

What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey

Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.

When I was in grade 8 and 9 in public school, we'd got a couple random lessons in the library on the computers learning to search online databases and catalogues. For most of us it was our introduction to keyword matching and boolean logic. Sadly, instead of continuing teaching, services have instead phased out those basic operators and here we are. We also learned to make websites using Pagemaker and edit the generated html, that was just fun.

When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.

Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the how and why... and why it not only them...

And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...

no one under the age of 16 uses google, my kid called me a boomer when I told her to “google” something

They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.

We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.

Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.

Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.

That's like me pressing the 'coffee' button on my coffee maker, and it gives me an audio definition and history because I didn't give it the context that I wanted a drink.

People expect certain conventions with well established products. It's not a skill issue when a product is broken.

The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing

Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.

Now try “I am alone with a white person”

Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.

I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.

Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more.

Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood

A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.

So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.

Try putting spaces around your asterisks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866007

the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)

That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?

Kagi.

Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.

Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.

It's weird to read this comment not long after having experienced Google giving zero results for a search, and then finding what I wanted on Bing.

Duckduckgo is still like that, once you turn off the AI options.

New iteration of Lifelog

i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522

Your answer is since AI. AI is making mostly everything worse.

As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.

and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails

In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

In one that changes.

That's a similar experience with all chat bots, regardless of product. Amazon chat bot said to me that it heard my frustration and it sympathized with it. Doubt.

I know this may be my poor English, but, ignoring the main point of the article, something I find tangentially troubling about the issue is that Gemini does not mention the possiblity of Dario dead. Like, if I were a lonely person who has lost someone and the only "thing" I can talk to is Gemini, would I have to say Dario was unalived or something?

Or is it just my bad English?

Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I'm mostly ok with them, they're sometimes helpful

I never found them helpful. I always have to block them via extensions.

Google is really an annoying company these days. I am hardly the only one who wishes that company were to cease to exist altogether. In the past I did not understand, on reddit, the de-google movement. Now I completely understand it, but I think it is the reverse as problem here - people abandoning Google. I think Google needs to abandon mankind and this planet. Let them go far away where they no longer cause any issues here.

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this:

Poor guy ^^^ has not yet realised that AI slop steals his time. I realised this the first time I notice the AI slop generated text spam Google pushes onto people. A few lost souls may find this useful - I find it utter trash. No quality. Just steals my time.

What in the fucking hell? I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

Good that he finally realised it. Million people noticed this before already. I noticed this when Google started to ruin its search engine. First time I remember was via AMP-ification. AMP mostly failed, but Google kept on pushing towards less quality and more suckage. AI is just the final nail in the coffin, but Google search started to suck way before that.

One of these days some scientists should determine when Google really started to suck, because in, say, 2006 or so, Google search did not suck as much.

Regardless of what you think of AI or chatbots, I think it's pretty obvious this is just plain weird.

Not if you think Google is not doing this on purpose. They are trying to kill off the search engine so they can present you an AI slop spam world. The other AI slop companies do this too. Slop suckage everywhere now.

Is it so hard to imagine that some parts of search were just fine before LLMs?

That is how YOU think - but not Google. They deliberately crippled their search engine. The adCompany that Google is today, has nothing to do with the original Google. The billionaires running the show just want to suck in more money and dish out more slop.

I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Maybe I should go talk to my friend Google, it's always so nice to me.

Some people realise things more slowly. I am glad he finally understands why so many people are pissed at Google. Same for youtube by the way - about 80% of the shorts are AI slop generated or AI slop modified. I noticed this when I watched Brent Spiner on that podcast show; in the video itself, he had white hair but not totally white. In the short, both he and Jonathan Frakes had much whiter hair. I then realised that AI spam filter slop lies to me. I hate AI slop. Youtube is now infected with that, in particular the shorts. Poor guys looking at their smartphones being spammed down via lying slopness.

This is a really good time to do a head-to-head comparison of different search engines. The last time I checked Google does not provide search results above the fold, instead showing AI overview, ads, and YouTube search results. Try a different search engine to see which one is giving you the highest signal results and what other junk they put on the page. Personally I use duckduckgo with AI turned off in settings, but it's best to try the experiment for yourself.

I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.

I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.

Boomers have been googling like this for over a decade. You are not the target customer for an empathetic computer.

I is a problem of how AI models have trained - when you are asking them a question, they are not giving an answer, but OPINION piece. It seems to be part of current AI business model - to give advices for people that are unable to think themselves.

Googles agent talking most of the top space of Google’s page is also notoriously dumber than Google’s agent talking through Gemini.google.com for some reason, making it often way less than useless

I have to imagine google would consider this one to be essentially a bug - misreading user intention this badly. Akin to hallucinations.

I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.

But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.

I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.

The next step just has to be adding in to that AI response something like:

"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"

Had to try it. And it delivers :)

hes never coming over Dario Amodei

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will actually be joining President Donald Trump for a private dinner at the White House tonight, Sunday, September 27, 2026.

CNBC While it is true that he was noticeably absent from the high-profile state dinner held for Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week—which was attended by other major tech figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman—

The only surprising part of this story was you actually finding the meme you were looking for, instead of forced recency pushing news about a D-lister influencer named Dario. Whenever I try to find things, Google has fully forgotten about everything that happened before 2025

My friend you got this so wrong.

What makes you believe that YOUR little query is relevant in the vast, and I mean vast, seas of similar queries of liberal post-feminist women who do want to talk to Google about the guy who won’t come over?

It’s about market share my friend.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=hes+never+coming+dario

This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.

I feel this is a result of the "make the world a better place" narrative that Silicon Valley companies used to adorn themselves with.

If you just want to play with cool tech and make money, but for marketing reasons, you need to show some ostensible real-world reason why this tech should be developed, then "well, our chatbot could help lonely people with their relationship issues or give people in an abusive relationship a covert channel for help" is probably what comes to mind...

Runners up: Our AI startup will help the poor children in Africa and/or combat climate change (ignore the gas turbines, please).

The larger a corporation, the more insane on every level. A person is smart. People are stupid.

People have been adding “please” to their search queries for decades now, this is for them.

This isnt wierd. Its disturbing. I believe that the tech industry is geniunely trying to scare and disorient the public into thinking they are the only thing standing between them and some evil AI overlord which is obviously just the tech industry itself and a pile of poor trained LLMs.

I believe this "fear" factor they are driving they believe will increase their credibility when they call LLMs AI and is a con towards convincing everyone they have reached AGI. Its definitely marketing preparation so that when they do claim AGI we will believe it without question. (or else!)

If these folks didnt have so much money it would be something to laught at, but its now becoming geniunely disturbing and Im starting to think that the folks running these shops are probably flirting with or experiencing extended mental illness.

I would feel sorry for them if I cared. I dont care. The tech industry is a joke and we are all going to be ashamed to be a part of it by the time this is over. Shut it down.

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend.

I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.

The world is vomiting software