Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what’s going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn’t Vice do this at one point?
Maybe. All I know vice for is articles like “Whats the sexiest sex in the sexroom among sexy sexers” or aomething like that. So the average r/askreddit post
So if they were basically regurgitating Reddit already, does that mean they were using AI before it was cool? They might have just used the Amazon approach to AI (I.e., why use technology when we can throw a bunch of minimum workers at the problem).
I recall vice doing that at one time also.
Isn’t 404 media the guys from Vice who left before it imploded?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/business/media/404-media-vice-motherboard.html
Apparently so! I dunno how to remove the paywall for others I just use reader mode.
Just create an account, it’s free.
And give them my data? Nahhh
The article’s author was the Editor-in-chief of Vice’s Motherboard as stated in his bio.
They were always hit-or-miss, but we’re all worse off for them getting eaten by a hedge fund.
I saw this exact same “reporting” on the Verge and several other sites yesterday and earlier in the week, and without the paywall 404 has half way down reading the article.