Sadly critical thinking skills have atrophied steeply in the last decade.

This is what bothers me a lot. For the people who doesn't know how it's made or want to believe, it's a miracle.

For me, it's a resource wasting text generator. I'll not lie, I don't use OpenAI, Mistral or Anthropic's models, even for coding. I prefer to read my API docs and cry once.

I used Gemini, five or six times in total. Twice I asked a couple of very specific things, and it unearthed them. Since they were not products, but information, that was helpful. Twice, it has given wrong information. When I "told" it, there was another way, it said "of course there are two ways", etc. Tasteless and time wasting.

I don't like using an LLM all day long, or offload my thinking to them. It's the ultimate self-poisoning incident.

And as you say, these algorithms can't know right/wrong/logical/bullshit, etc. They just spew out text.

Far from widespread? SEO has seeped to all crevices of the internet for the last 20 years.

Yeah, I meant not individual ads but implicit forced/influenced preference for certain brands. Let’s say it always picks Coke vs Pepsi when giving an example of a soft drink. Or picks BMW when asked to pick the best car. Which cloud provider is the best? -Why, GCP of course, etc.

Companies then get to bid for a preference “place”. This is more like Google paying to be the search engine default in Firefox.