Funny you say that. I was recently searching for a e-scooter lighter than 10Kg and all Google could find was the max allowed weight of the person riding the thing (around 100-130kg). Not to mention that it didn't understand how to make a conjunction and show me light e-scooters with suspension. It's just matching keywords without understanding anything about the relations between them.
I am disappointed at the current quality of Google search, especially in shopping related queries where money is to be made. Instead of stuffing my pages with irrelevant 'personally' targeted ads and tracking my every move they should make an effort in that particular moment when I actually want to buy something and give me a good suggestion.
That's the power of these things. Would you know you're reading a social media comment generated by something akin to this? No, at best it would be ambiguous.
There is no way for an everyday person to tell how much of their life is impacted by ML at this point.
I honestly wouldn't care much if I was reading stuff written by bots, as long as I didn't waste time talking back ;)
Are they? Where?
For all the hype I haven't seen any obvious abuses of AI. I've seen better speech recognition and a few other useful things. I've seen stuff that's wrong but ultimately kind of trivial like auto-generated porn with celebrity faces, but that's the worst stuff so far.
I haven't seen clear, unambiguous cases of abuse beyond that. I've seen a lot of allegations that AI is being abused e.g. "Russian bots" but on investigation these stories usually evaporate.
If anything I've been kind of disappointed by AI so far. Amazing demo videos abound, but I'd guess 90% of the impact of AI in my life has been Google improving their already quite good services. Better translations, better search results etc. All very welcome but not really life changing.