I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.
I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.
Yeah, that's why I said I don't know where the internet is heading to.
Also generally wondering… Do labs view scraping as legally safer than trying to cache the Internet? I figure it’s easy to mark certain content as all but evergreen (can do a quick secondary check for possible new news).
Maybe caching everything is too expensive?
It says things I know to be false fairly regularly. I don't keep a log or anything, but it's left an impression that it's far from reliable.
The AI answer got the actual questions completely wrong. The questions involved vehicle registration laws in a specific state. The questions included the name of the state. The AI's answer seemed to be giving information based on other states.
All of the first page of search results were specific to the state I asked for, so if it was just summarizing those you wouldn't think it would give answers that would only exist on entirely different pages.
You would know how?
The links contradict or do not support the overviews often in my experience.
In fact, if you switch to "Pro" mode, it frequently says the complete opposite of what it claimed in "Fast" mode while still being ~10-20% wrong. (Not to say it's not useful — there's no better way to aggregate and synthesize obscure information — but it should definitely not be relied on a source of anything other than links for detailed followup.)
While trying to find an example by going back through my history though, the search "linux shebang argument splitting" comes back from the AI with:
> On Linux and most Unix-like systems, the shebang line (e.g., #!/bin/bash ...) does not perform argument splitting by default. The entire string after the interpreter path is passed as a single argument to the interpreter.
(that's correct) …followed by:
> To pass multiple arguments portably on modern systems, the env command with the -S (split string) option is the standard solution.
(`env -S` isn't portable. IDK if a subset of it is portable, or not. I tend to avoid it, as it is just too complex, but let's call "is portable" opinion.)
(edited out a bit about the splitting on Linux; I think I had a different output earlier saying it would split the args into "-S" and "the rest", but this one was fine.)
> Note: The -S option is a modern extension and may not be available
But this, … which is it.
I felt similarly yesterday. This morning AIMode fabricated for me a diverse science education publishing and research effort around using generative AI to teach rough-quantitative reasoning. My face-nibbling canary was a linked cite to a book "Orders of Magnitude"... a sci-fi horror novella about space marines. Would be nice if the outlined work actually existed. There we some nice ideas. I look forward to it. The education stuff, not the space marines.
Sometimes I use a completely meaningless combination of keywords by mistake, and AI Overview will happily make up a story telling me what I am looking for.
Without the content site the AI overview will become useless
I think content sites will need to rely on supporters (ala patreon or substack). It's shitty but it's what the internet has come to
Of course Google gets little credit for this since it was their own malfeasance that led to all the SEO spam anyway (and the horrible expertsexchange-quality tech information, and stupid recipe sites that put life stories first)... but at least there now there is a backpressure against some of the spammy crap.
I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying? Or more likely applying some serious negative bias to the pattern they're reporting. The overviews are wrong sometimes, yes, but surely it is like 10% of the time, not always. Probably they're biased because they're generally mad at google, or AI being shoved in their face in general, and I get that... but you don't make the case against google/AI stronger by misrepresenting it; it is a stronger argument if it's accurate and resonates with everyones' experiences.
What good is it if the overviews lie some percentage of the time (your own guess is 10%) and you have to search to verify that they aren't making shit up anyway. Also, those SEO spam-ridden garbage sites google feeds you whenever you bother to look past the undependable AI summaries are mostly written by AI these days and prone to the same problem of lying which only makes fact checking google's auto-bullshitter even harder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
No one remembers when AI Overview gets the answer right (it's expected to do so after all) but everyone has their favorite examples of "oh stupid AI."
Think about the urban legends in the style of "the average person eats X spiders per year." It's extremely unlikely that Rumor Patient Zero is in a position to realize it's wrong, or that they will inform the next person that it came from an LLM summary.