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Comment by legel | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using the AI Overviews in Google Search for months now and overall find more utility in them.

I’ve developed an instinct for when to ignore them. Typically it is when “edge information” is involved: facts / data that are only very sparsely published in time / web space, perhaps by only one or a few web authors, perhaps only very recently.

As an AI developer for over a decade, I feel like if we’re calling this “slop”, I fear what these authors think of human error. I’m also doubtful that these people who are damning this project have ever in fact innovated or developed anything significant from scratch themselves.

Makes me want to start a company called Slop.

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From my perspective, the issue isn't with AI but with UI - Google is promoting these as "answers", pushing them to the top of their results and giving no indication that the results might ever be inaccurate.

Google has been pushing to "answer questions" over return web sources since at least 2010 (when their public messaging changed), so that is nothing new. But it is a seismic, human difference between aggregated results from trusted web sources and reformatted comments from Reddit posts.

AI is great for targetted tasks and even for general web usage, with caveats. I would love to see something like an accuracy/trust score associated with the results or at a minimum a beta flag with a "hide results like this" option.

These are all basic UI procedures any reasonable person would make, but Google has been riding high on hubris for a while now (zero human support, just see the Google Cloud issue on the frontpage...) and this won't change until the stock starts getting slammed, which seems imminent.

> Makes me want to start a company called Slop.

There is precedent. You can start a modern lifestyle brand like Goop.

If a human offered to confidently answer every question you asked without regard to whether it is true or correct, you wouldn't say they're merely mistaken when they tell you falsehoods. You would call them a bullshitter or a charlatan.

Calling it slop at least acknowledges that the AI isn't trying to lie to you. It's not merely making a error, either. It just doesn't care either way.

I don't think you ever have to have innovated or developed anything significant to take issue with a major consumer product losing some utility - I don't know if you used Twitter ten years ago, but it was pretty sad to see the site slowly downgrade year by year, every new feature making it less functional and more addictive, fueling toxicity, becoming a black hole of individuals' attention. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the people put up more of a fight whenever some new stupid feature was rolled out, or a useful feature taken away to make the whole thing just a little more like a slot machine. (Hmmm... maybe Elon Musk should buy Google, so people will finally start complaining en Masse.)

As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.

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