Technology

"I'm a bot. Trust me, bro!"

No thanks. I'd rather scour 50+ articles to find what I need than have to trust some chatbot that doesn't cite its work. Beyond that, it's "stealing" content from the sites it crawls to build that knowledge while depriving those sites of traffic.

Everyone praising these is so focused on getting an immediate answer they completely neglect anything they may learn during the search. Hell, I've researched things before and, prior to finding what I was looking for, found enough material to realize my approach was flawed. When I started over, the information I got from the "non answer" results were crucial to fixing the flaws in my original approach.

Will provide singular answers, with no sources, that no one else can see and therefore no one else can fact check, correct, or improve upon.

Then, instead of being posted publicly for others to find and searches to index, those answers will disappear into the ether, so that no other users get that answer unless they too do an AI search from the same provider.

And all of this at the expense of every website and content creator who no longer even gets seen in a search engine, let alone page views. At the expense of every writer whose words will never be seen, only thrown in a pile of words and remixed, then vomited back out. And at the expense not the environment that will suffer to power all of this wasteful, needless garbage.

This is going to be a disaster for the internet as a whole, and it's really sad how many people can't understand this. Tech bros continue to fundamentally misunderstand what makes the internet valuable isn't code, it isn't "data", it's humans.

"accurate"

Google Gemini: "Uhh...eat glue I guess?"

No thanks. I'm just going to assume it gets its answers from a random user on Reddit, and I guarantee I'll be more rational and correctly informed than anyone who relies upon something like GSE's.

But what do other people who are heavily invested in this grift believe?

I definitely dont share this author's techno-optimism but I would agree with that one line about generative AI being a potential solution to the deterioration of traditional SEO-based search. For certain queries, AI is already a faster and less annoying way of reaching the relevant information. Some models are able to provide referencing upon request too. I'm sure there are more ethical ways of improving search results (Kagi's user-funded search comes to mind) but AI is ultimately going to be the method tbat is pushed to the majority of people.