It’s good to see the sentiment growing. Anecdotally, there are non-technical people in my circle that use LLMs frequently as search engine replacements or to do stupid shit like generate pictures and emojis. I hope that begins to decline with the general sentiment called out in this article.
The sheer number of useless LLM integrations in every website, every mobile app, and hell, even smart TVs is insane. I feel like it’s causing people very real feature fatigue. And all of the Internet content and advertising slop is making the takeover seem so much worse.
I react with either neutral apathy, disgust or surprise when somebody tries to show me their latest AI generated blob. Repeat twice and they stop using it. Our fear of social embarassment is higher than our desire to use AI.
“Look at this picture of me in a Ghibli style I generated”
“Oh… It’s kinda bad isn’t it? I’d avoid sharing it”
“Oh remember what we were debating earlier? Gemini said that…”
“Oh I know what you’re going to say, it said something totally dumb, right? I know, one must be very stupid to trust it haha so anyway what were you saying?”
Search engine replacement is probably the only use case of AI for me - for the times when I don’t know exactly what I’m searching for so the conversation style is helpful.
Is it the conversational style? or that search engines have been designed to be actively worse to keep your eyeballs spending more time looking at advertisements now?
Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.
Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.
I do use DDG as my default. I was using “googling” for the sake of making a witty remark. Even so, the results are usually comparable - the first couple dozen results are mostly AI/SEO slop.
Not OP but - It’s both. Sometimes I’m searching for something very specific and Google just refuses to give me what I need, while serving tonnes of promoted bullshit. Copilot will then (sometimes) give me the results I need much faster.
Other times I have a vague idea of what I’m looking for and an AI like Copilot can narrow it down for me or sometimes just flat out give me the result I need.
Of course, that only works if it doesn’t hallucinate bullshit answers, which it does regularly. Still, with how far Google has fallen, sometimes it’s just faster to go through Copilot and sift out hallucinations anyway.
There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.
It’s good to see the sentiment growing. Anecdotally, there are non-technical people in my circle that use LLMs frequently as search engine replacements or to do stupid shit like generate pictures and emojis. I hope that begins to decline with the general sentiment called out in this article.
The sheer number of useless LLM integrations in every website, every mobile app, and hell, even smart TVs is insane. I feel like it’s causing people very real feature fatigue. And all of the Internet content and advertising slop is making the takeover seem so much worse.
Edit: Grammar, formatting
I react with either neutral apathy, disgust or surprise when somebody tries to show me their latest AI generated blob. Repeat twice and they stop using it. Our fear of social embarassment is higher than our desire to use AI.
“Look at this picture of me in a Ghibli style I generated”
“Oh… It’s kinda bad isn’t it? I’d avoid sharing it”
“Oh remember what we were debating earlier? Gemini said that…”
“Oh I know what you’re going to say, it said something totally dumb, right? I know, one must be very stupid to trust it haha so anyway what were you saying?”
Search engine replacement is probably the only use case of AI for me - for the times when I don’t know exactly what I’m searching for so the conversation style is helpful.
For horribly inaccurate results that sound like they were written by a $5 SEO article writer.
Ill stick with key word search and skipping over all the SEO crap for.real results.
Is it the conversational style? or that search engines have been designed to be actively worse to keep your eyeballs spending more time looking at advertisements now?
I used to be good at googling information I needed. Then Google changed what googling does.
Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.
Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.
Fuck you Google, you waste my time.
Don’t use Google. DDG works with keyword searches and you get exactly what you expect.
I do use DDG as my default. I was using “googling” for the sake of making a witty remark. Even so, the results are usually comparable - the first couple dozen results are mostly AI/SEO slop.
Oh, go to your DDG options and turn the AI slop off.
Not OP but - It’s both. Sometimes I’m searching for something very specific and Google just refuses to give me what I need, while serving tonnes of promoted bullshit. Copilot will then (sometimes) give me the results I need much faster.
Other times I have a vague idea of what I’m looking for and an AI like Copilot can narrow it down for me or sometimes just flat out give me the result I need.
Of course, that only works if it doesn’t hallucinate bullshit answers, which it does regularly. Still, with how far Google has fallen, sometimes it’s just faster to go through Copilot and sift out hallucinations anyway.
There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.
Definitely, there is using AI when you want and then there is having AI forced down your throat