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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
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The part about Google isn’t wrong.
But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.
I’d say they at least give more immediately useful info. I’ve got to scroll past 5-8 sponsored results and then the next top results are AI generated garbage anyways.
Even though I think he’s mostly right, the AI techbro gameplan is obvious. Position yourself as a better alternative to Google search, burn money by the barrelful to capture the market, then begin enshitification.
In fact, enshitification has already begun; responses are comparatively expensive to generate. The more users they onboard, the more they have to scale back the quality of those responses.
ChatGPT is already getting worse at code commenting and programming.
The problem is that enshitification is basically a requirement in a capitalist economy.
I mean most top searches are AI generated bullshit nowadays anyway. Adding Reddit to a search is basically the only decent way to get a proper answer. But those answers are not much more reliable than ChatGPT. You have to use the same sort of skepticism and fact checking regardless.
Google has really gotten horrible over the years.
Most of the results after the first page on Google are usually the same as the usable results, just mirrored on some shady site full of ads and malware.
because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.
From my experience with BingChat, it’s completely true. BingChat will search with Bing and summarize the results, providing sources and all. And the results are complete garbage most of the time, since search results are filled with garbage.
Meanwhile if you ask ChatGPT, which doesn’t have Internet access, you get a far more sophisticated answer and correct answer. You can also answer follow up questions.
Web search is an absolutely terrible place for accurate information. ChatGPT in contrast consumes all the information out there, which makes it much harder for incorrect information to slip in, as information needs to be replicated frequently to stick around. It can and often is still wrong of course, but it is far better than any single website you’ll find.
And of course all of this is still very early days for LLMs. GPT was never build with correctness in mind, it was build to autocomplete text, everything else was patchwork after the fact. The future of search is AI, no doubt about that.
Chatgpt flat out hallucinates quite frequently in my experience. It never says “I don’t know / that is impossible / no one knows” to queries that simply don’t have an answer. Instead, it opts to give a plausible-sounding but completely made-up answer.
A good AI system wouldn’t do this. It would be honest, and give no results when the information simply doesn’t exist. However, that is quite hard to do for LLMs as they are essentially glorified next-word predictors. The cost metric isn’t on accuracy of information, it’s on plausible-sounding conversation.
Ask chatgpt “tell me the biography of the famous painter sndrtj” to see how good the bot is at hallucinating an incredible realistic story that never happened.
You don’t even have to make stuff up to get it to hallucinate. I once asked chat gpt who the original bass player was for Metallica was, and it repeatedly gave me the wrong answer, and even at one point said “Dave Ellefson.”
I suspect that client-side AI might actually be the kind of thing that filters the crap from search results and actually gets you what you want.
That would only be Chat-AI if it turns out natural language queries are better to determine the kind of thing the user is looking for than people trying to craft more traditional query strings.
I’m thinking each person would can train their AI based on which query results they went for in unfiltered queries, with some kind of user provided feedback of suitability to account for click-bait (i.e. somebody selecting a result because it looks good but it turns out its not).
Even if AI magically got to the point of providing accurate and good results, I would still profoundly object to using it.
First, it’s a waste of resources. The climate impact of AI is enough of a reason why we should leave it dead until we live in a world with limitless energy and water.
Second, I don’t trust a computer to select my sources for me. Sometimes you might have to go through a few pages, but with traditional search engines at least you are presented with a variety of sources and you can use your god given ability of critical thinking.
I don’t trust a computer to select my sources for me.
I’m not sure what you think modern search engines do, but this is pretty much it. Hell, all of the popular ones have been using AI signals for years.
You can request as many sources from an AI as you would get from Google.
Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I’m checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though - it does seem to flirt more with AI than with transparency, which has me worried.
But absolutely, it’s not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.
Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.
That’s LLMs, which is what is necessary for Chat-AI (the first “L” in there quite literally stands for Large).
Remove the stuff necessary to process natural human language and those things tend to be way smaller, especially if they’re just trained using the user’s own actions.
The climate change has become the new CP go to argument to condone the stupidest reasoning. Just like blocking Torrent sites to prevent CP, let’s block AI to prevent climate change.
I already go to ChatGPT more than Google. If you pay for it then the latest version can access the internet and if it doesn’t know the answer to something it’ll search the internet for you. Sometimes I come across a large clickbait page and I just give ChatGPT the link and tell it to get the information from it for me.
When I tried it it was never able to give me the sources of what it said. And it has given me way too many made up answers to just trust it without reasons. Having to search for sources after it said something has made me skip the middle man(machine).
ChatGPT powers Bing Chat, which can access the internet and find answers for you, no purchase necessary (if you’re not on edge, you might need to install a browser extension to access it as they are trying to push edge still).
I know I’m dreaming here, but central internet services like google search and youtube should be utilities controlled by the public.
The video pool that Youtube draws from, generated by the public, should be public property, hosted on public servers, internationalized somehow, with an opensource market of frontend interfaces and algorithms to deliver that content to people, instead of one youtube algorithm and one interface designed to meet the profit incentives of google. People should be free to use the algorithm and interface they find most useful.
This was started over two decades ago, but never came about because the copyright cartel destroyed it. It was called peer to peer (p2p) tech.
The cartel even tried to pass laws which would allow them to control what media you could have on your computer. (The SSSCA and later CBDTPA) This is where the term Digital Rights Management came from.
‘entrepreneur’ lacks the positive vibe it used to bring. like saying ‘visionary’ or ‘genius’. overuse has tipped these terms into ‘yeah right’ and ‘clickbait’ especially when appearing in headlines. blame google for aggregating clickbait headlines but they aren’t writing them. interesting that telegraph.co.uk hosting this is packed full with ‘clickbait’. designed with LCD appeal and low value content like this story
And why do you think they are written in this manner? Does it have something to do with ads? Praytell, who owns the ad platform as well as search?
Pretty balsy to blame the writers, they are simply chasing the algorithm Google makes. In the end, Google does really control it all. So if you wanna be mad at someone, I’d say start with the one forcing everyone to do this.
why can’t bing and ddg take more market share. simply poor algorithm design or is one actually better. G haters unite!
Because they both pull the same censorship so there’s no discernable difference where it matters?
Gimme a call when any website can exist purely on DDG traffic or Bing’s ad platform.
These days, entrepreneur just means unemployed.
I know Google is a big corpo but its hardly the only reason behind the state of the internet. It is a major factor, but to single out Google when Microsoft and others have played just as significant of a role is odd.
Disagree. Google is considerably more relevant to the Internet and especially advertising on the net than MS
Google is terrible. It is beyond me that the majority of the population is dumb/uneducated enough to use it.
I’ll just use this opportunity to mention kagi.com, a search engine that you pay for, but which doesn’t track you and gives you controls for customizing your search results yourself instead of letting an algorithm build a profile of your habits. I’ve used it for months now, and I’m not going back.
Oh yes, it’s Google who ruined the Internet… Not all the Content farms like facebook, instagram, twitter and online news. Its the search engine guys.
Why not a combination of both? Seems most realistic.
I agree. Google opened the way to monetization by advertisements and certain requirements to achieve that monetization (SEO and other meta stuff)…
It is all of them. This is just scapegoating. The internet wasnt ruined by alphabet. It was ruined way before by increasing it’s value to companies.
DDG to the rescue! It’s astounding how in this day and age, duckduckgo gives much more meaningful results than google. Exception made for local businesses, but for technical info and issues, DDG is way better.
Obligatory mention of Kagi (which is actually brilliant).
Mmm, but what’s their plan to resist enshittification? After all, Google started out as “fundamentally different, user-centric.” What will Kagi do when their market penetration peaks and the business managers demand more growth?
I’d really like it if we stopped blaming the corporation and start blaming the people that make the decisions there and the people that implement those decisions. From the CEO’s to the programmers. Put their names everywhere, show the world who actually ruined it. Google was the best resource humanity had to access information. Now, more often than not, I can not find anything related to my search. The search algorithm they used 20 years ago was better than this new junk.
I’d rather we build something better ourselves than hoping that companies turn “good”. A whole lot of the modern Internet’s problems are simply the result of leaving everything up to big companies instead of building our own better stuff. In the software world we have Open Source, Linux, GNU and all that, in the content world we have Creative Commons and for online services we have basically nothing. No licenses, rules or even best practices. Worse yet, whenever there is some effort in that direction, it’s often fundamentally broken (e.g. Signal requiring a phone number, Fediverse giving full control to the server not the user, etc.).
PS: If you want old school Google, try kagi.com. It’s expensive, but the closest thing to good search we have at the moment.
I agree with most of what you said except I don’t expect companies to turn good. They don’t do good or evil, they do profit by whatever means. It’s intrinsic!
I’d like to help build some shit, got any recommendations? I can do the type type beep boop as long as that neural net is left out. Fuck that black box shit. I think it is the real reason for the shit algorithms these days. Which leads me to my next point. I get the exact same results from Kagi as I do from DDG. They are identical >90% of the time. Kagi does provide features that are worth paying for but I want better results, they existed before.
Once upon a time I could search for something incredibly specific and find an obscure forum with the answer. These days all I get, even with Kagi is the same results from SEO optimized garbage to AI generated dribble.
I really do not understand why Kagi is so promoted here. I really have not found it to be any better.
The problem with DDG is that it is just marketing on top of Bing. It doesn’t improve the Bing search results in any way, adds no new features and has no ambitions to build its own index. Never quite understand why it got popular in the first place when you can just use Bing instead and get literally the exact same thing.
Kagi is much closer to Google, bigger index and more up to date results than Bing, it has a lot of old features Google removed over the years, it removes a lot of the SEO spam that fills up Google and so on. It feels like modern version of Google without the enshittification. And yes, you can find most of the sites in any other search engine just as well, everybody is searching the same Web after all. It’s not magic, it can’t fix everything that is broken with the Web, but Kagi is a much cleaner more user focused experience.
What makes Kagi interesting in the end that going from Google to any of the alternatives always felt like a downgrade, Kagi is the only one I ever tried that felt like an upgrade.
