> I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself
No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I think.
Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact that I've been backed into this corner where my choice is to swallow my principles or throw away a career I've worked half my life on
There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.
Ironically, Googles AI overview often links to references that state the polar opposite of what the AI overview claims.
It was not, and at least because it was obviously wrong I clicked through to a page with the real UV index.
But had it said "The UV index is 1.7" I might have believed it, but it'd still have been wrong, potentially dangerously so.
Now to be clear, live data is precisely the sort of thing I expect it to get wrong, and I never intended to trigger let alone read an "AI summary", but it's still worrying for those less inclined to dismiss it.
Half the time it just describes some unrelated shit. Maybe it’s interesting but totally sidetracks your search.
IMO it’s like Google 15 years ago where it was causing more panic and disinformation but people knew it back then - we laughed at Google’s persistent and incorrect diagnoses.
Now though, with boomers and young Gen Y and older Gen Z - maybe the dumbest yet most confident people alive it’s causing a lot of harm. Everyone thinks they know everything and because they inherit from their parents and are basically rich society rewards them for being retarded
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Fundamental learning path does not change. Whatever searche result force feeds you it's ok. So long as you have a critical thinking mindset.
People simply read titles, and oh that's what happened.
If you apply the first order thinking, you can spot most of mistakes in docs and results. But then you gotta move onto the second order thinking to see if the conclusion you came up with will be good for the future.
Say, you searched for how to build a house yourself.
You see an AI result that recommends contractors.
But if you break it down why AI recommended the contractor, you can see harness (assumptions) such ass security (the builder/searcher should not be harmed), convinience (how fast do you need) without regards to your personal needs. - that's why comapnies want so much of your info, so they can try to guess better output based on your needs.
Now you breakdown using the 1st principle, you find out that you don't want those assumed AI answer, and you ask more direct question and guide it.
But then after applying the 2nd order principle, you might buy into the AI's recommendation that you don't want to spend too much time building one yourself for the safety (you are a pro athelet, who should not do heavy labor for the sake of the next game match).
Anyways, consider multiple thinking models and views.
Or, in a more simple sense it’s entirely Google’s fault
Searches propagate between nodes, nodes specialize on specific sections of the index, which can be random + user preference (maximizing redundance and availability for the things people actually care about).
Soulseek already gets like halfway there and it's not even trying to be. How hard could it be?
Is there a lot of additional secret sauce that made google work well in its prime?
Now when I am looking for information on this or that I'm obliged to append reddit, Wikipedia or YouTube in my search to hope to have something with real content (and I hate watching videos to be kept informed and I feel there is more and more LLM generated content there also).
I even have a subscription to chatgpt now that I use more and more as a replacement for a Google search, or at least as a supplement.
I don't like it very much because in the best case I have only a handful of sources that it selected instead of being able to look by myself at all the possible sources, but it is still better than spending hours finding something that is not SEO-slop.
I'm convinced it will never improve because it helps google and the others push their AI stuff, and they desperately need it to justify the billions poured in it, but also because it gave them a much deeper control on what is provided to the users.