It’s one thing for the search results to bubble up a wrong result. You go to it, and then you go back and look at more results to get a more complete picture. See where those different sites disagree and where they agree.
But these AI results don’t do that. They are providing a single answer and confidently trying to come off as that is the answer. No fuzziness about its reliability.
Every time it is right, it slowly could be deemed as reliable to a general population until it is dangerously wrong. But then you don’t question it since it was right so many other times.
Me and others I know follow this workflow when we try to find out the answer to some question we don't know the answer to.
But the vast majority of people outside of my own personal friend circle don't seem to approach it like this. Their approach looks more like:
1. Search for thing
2. Read the first info-box that pops up, if it does. That's what they think is 100% the correct information. If no info-box:
3. Read the short description for the first link that appears (sometimes an ad) and take that as the correct answer.
Ideally, people would be more careful, but I haven't seen that in practice.
But at least those info boxes are not generating text on its own, it's what is on the website already and clearly includes a source.
At least though, if you are even only looking at that first result it's still different than google ai generating an answer. Barely different, but different.
It's really unfortunate that Google is going to torch so much of the open internet in order to shovel this nonsense onto people. Of course as organic search traffic dries up and reduces new high quality content, and AI slop floods the internet, the GenAI results will get even worse.
You contrast this with the demo's showed for chatgpt-4o and we are building this idea that we can really trust this. I was just having a conversation with someone over the weekend that I was like, yes I acknowledge that the tech is really good, just in a couple years it has advanced a ton, but I really think we are overselling its current capabilities and ignoring where it falls flat on its face. That we are going too quick rolling this technology out to the average user in every day situations.
And there response was basically, no don't think so. It is ready to be used, there are not these big issues, and so on.
Thats really scary. And these are fundamental issues with this type of technology but "we can't risk another company putting out their misguided dangerous product so we must do it first!" I am convinced that is the general attitude at these companies right now.
> Contrast this with posing the query as a question to a dialogue agent and receiving a single answer, possibly synthesized from multiple sources, and presented from a disembodied voice that seems to have both the supposed objectivity of not being a person (despite all the data it is working with coming from people) and access to “all the world's knowledge”
A year ago everyone was trashing Google for being ahead for years on the science of AI, but completely failing to productize it. "OpenAI is going to eat Google's search business for lunch", was the prevailing narrative. This is what people said they wanted!
I'm sure it's clear to everyone now[0] that genAI is not a search solution, and Google's former approach of quietly putting AI into phones and products without it being flashy and in-your-face was actually a better strategy.
[0] Just kidding, I'm certain that the industry and especially the people running Google will learn all the wrong lessons from this.
People say a lot of shit. Doesn't mean you should put your poorly performing Q&A AI to provide people with outright false answers, I'm pretty sure no one asked for that.
After all, Google is running their own products, and when they make shitty choices, I think it's perfectly fair to question how they can make so bad decisions, no matter if I personally might have said "Google is failing to productize LLMs properly" or whatever.
One thing isn't related to the other. Actually most people noticing OpenAI/LLMs gonna displace Google enjoy the idea. Nobody is asking Google to give LLM results.
It's like they decided to speed run the trust thermocline they were already in. We're a long way from this Yahoo killer making the rounds on AOL chats and IM.
Sure, LLMs do amazing things, but so did all the previous once-disruptive technologies later widely adopted. Electricity, flight, nuclear energy, transistors and integrated circuits, the internet; AI is joining a very competitive list.
We've just never seen a disruptive technology with this much media buzz behind it so quickly, and such rapid technological advances. Disruptive technologies are never "ready for prime time" ... until they are.
Some of the answers are insanely gross like recommendations to jump off the golden state bridge for depression.
It's the long tail and new stuff that it will get wrong.
Except this was an actual response that it was giving. Tweet from a related HN thread ~yesterday on Google search hallucinations: https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502
With New Coke, the public reaction was negative.
In The Verge interview and elsewhere, Google claims the reaction to the current Google is positive.^1
No need for "Google Classic".
1. It's unlcear how Google concludes that people are happy with Google Search. It does not ask them.
That's a really weird and risky way of putting it.
There is a huge difference between being a search engine that finds (external) pages, and coming up with answers in your own name. If some page on the Internet says Obama is a Muslim, who cares, it's not important. But if Google says that Obama is in fact a Muslim, suddenly it's a very big deal. And that's true for every query, on every topic imaginable.
Every answer they get wrong attacks their image a little, and out of billions of queries it's inevitable they will get many wrong.
This forced, radical change motivated only by fear feels like Google+ all over again. Or New Coke.