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Comment by fscaramuzza | Hacker News Reader

What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results. Sounds like it's giving a ground truth from "multiple" data, when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff. In the context of a systematic review, the feature that I would love the most is augmenting my initial query, so that I can just get more results that I could find interesting. I am 100% sure they thought about this, but ignored it for the most profitable option.

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> What scares me about this new AI mode thingy

What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps.

I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life.

And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.

Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers.

Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.

It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it.

To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions.

Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"

When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.

In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.

"possible to choose" doesn't get us much.

An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance.

There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam.

For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.

Organic search dying was my first reaction too. But, who knows...this wouldn't be the first time I've heard that.

They are showing billions of people a big bold answer at the top of all their pages.

What a wildly irresponsible company

Go to Google right now and search anything. What is the very first thing you see?

> one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching...consider people asking medical or financial questions...many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers"...people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question?

It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.

The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time.

Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.

And this is a question about a Google product!

Ok, fair. Hard to understand why it would get that wrong.

I’d make assumptions about how the cheapest and fastest possible flash model optimized for being extra cheap and extra fast would get something wrong based on its limited context (which can be very incomplete summaries of search results)

I often have the expensive models give relatively simple inaccurate answers, even when they cite sources that directly contradict them. The error rate is lower, but you can’t have confidence with llm answers.

Did you just agree to a stranger's counterpoint on the internet? This post should be in a museum somewhere

The simple answer is that these systems are very bad at telling the truth reliably.

It somehow seems to interpret whatever sources it's grepping as the exact opposite of what those sources say fairly often. I've lost track of how many times I've clicked on the sources it cites, and every single one is in agreement, but the AI claims the opposite.

Because LLMs aren't sentient, they don't draw on facts, and they don't have nuance. The answer given is similar to answers you might expect to see for similar questions.

It's really amazing we can make machines do that, and it's really depressing that we think a stochastic bullshit machine is going to give us something we can rely on.

Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.

Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.

*so long as an accurate answer exists on the internet

Claude is OK at saying when it can’t find good information, but it’s still 50/50 on citing a source that has nothing to do with its claim.

> Ask a human a question like this

Why would a human know specs for a random phone off the top of their head? The human response is either "I don't know" or "let me look that up", not a hallucination.

I think that it feels a little wasteful to go to Google search to ask a question like this, only for the AI that's giving you an answer instead of page results to perform its own web search to get you the response.

Also, I asked a thinking model with browsing enabled and got this:

> The Google Pixel 10 is expected to support Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 / Tensor G5 chipset it will likely use, which includes an integrated Wi-Fi 7 modem. Specific finalized specs aren't confirmed until Google's official announcement.

(Model GLM-5-Turbo - two months old - using Kilo Code in the "Ask" profile; in its thinking token churn it reasoned that it should keep the response brief and direct. Perhaps not the best suite of model+harness for this task, but it's what I had to hand that's not quantized to shit, is a thinking model, and has a web search tool available to it.)

> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.

We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search.

The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.

LLMs are not a site. They are a clever person that can point you to sites. They, like humans, are fallible.

LLMs can not point you to sites, only in a general direction. That is because complete URLs do not exist as single tokens in any of the large models. It can synthesize a plausible-looking url, and if you're lucky that URL might even exist. But that doesn't mean that there is any relation between between the text surrounding a hyperlink in LLM output and the text on the linked page.

AI agents can verify and summarize URLs, but a plain LLM can not.

I bow to your correction. I was using LLMs as a sloppy shorthand for modern AI agents with best interfaces.

its bad in dev as well... i've seen llm code review bots tell me things that are flat-out not true; this like "this wont compile because windows 11 doesn't exist" like wtf am i paying for this again?

They are this wrong about everything, but you don't usually notice it when using it to look for things you aren't an expert in. The default stance really does need to be "do not trust, verify" at all times.

They can still be useful, e.g. they're significantly better at finding "I want a thing that does x but not y and it must be blue, or maybe two things that can be glued together to do that" than classic search. But they'll routinely miss extremely obvious answers because the related search it ran didn't find it, or completely screw up what something can actually do. Checking more pages of results by hand or asking humans who know even a little about those fields is still wildly more useful... but they're absolutely slaughtering the sites where people do that, by stealing all the real traffic and sending DDoS-level automated requests.

How can you say they are wrong about "everything"?

I built a retro game clone once and I used that project as a way to try out AI. While it wasn't perfect, it definitely wasn't wrong about everything. I'd go so far as to say it was probably correct (or damn close) 75% of the time.

I see people on HN all the time saying AI is terrible, but that just isn't the experience I'm having. I'm willing to admit it may have something to do with me not being able to recognize I'm being fed bullshit. Or, I may be asking really simple questions. Who knows? But AI seems like a pretty useful tool for average people.

Your profile says you're a guitarist. Take the model and talk to it about guitars. Not like "what's a good Stratocaster clone", talk to it about materials, physics and playing techniques and see if it feels like a reliable source of information (or even a solid thinking buddy), or someone who read a lot about guitars but has actually never played one.

I know bits from non-IT fields like RC planes and quads, electric motors, aerodynamics, mountain biking, cars. I often use Claude (Opus 4.7 on Max sub atm) to brainstorm new ideas or refine my understanding of some phenomena, and almost without fail, I can get it to claim something ridiculously stupid or contradictory 5-10 messages in. I can usually catch it, because I don't venture far from what I'm already familiar with, and I also need explanations to be thorough and things to make total sense to me before I accept them, but not everyone is that pedantic.

My google search for 'pixel 10 wifi 7' immediately shows the right answer. (10 Pro and 10 Pro XL support it but, but base Pixel 10 only supports Wifi 6E).

Though the inconsistency of results between users is definitely another frustrating thing.

I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

It’s hilariously persistent in this, esp. for anything even slightly divergent from the beaten path. Discount everything the AI box says about emacs to zero.

Admittedly I’m unsure if it was Google or DuckDuckGo. I switch between both. I quickly asked the in search AI for a UTC time conversion like a lazy fool and it got it off by almost a day wrong.

I avoid any asking any agent a fact-based (especially math) request. It's a great compression algorithm and a great language generator, and I guess the intersection of those two things is "an answer". Calculation doesn't intersect.

In past, people can trust Google. Now we should teach children don't trust "search result" from Google.

I asked it “how can I tell if a spray paint can is empty?” And it told me that the paint can would no longer rattle.

Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.

I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy

The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably.

With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about

Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.

To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy.

There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer

It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure.

I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them?

It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.

I’ll bet they intentionally obfuscate so people can’t find the actual sources of info used for the answers

> It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.

My guess is you can see this happening with the bots on Reddit where they are refining the answers to one certain thing, often getting two or three the same responses in a row from different users because they have been enforcing themselves by digesting the output of other bots. Waiting to see when they cut down the sentences and start talking garbage.

Can you share the query?

Google has been around for a quarter of a century. People are still incredibly dumb and will believe whatever they like.

The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said".

Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top.

I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it.

/rant over.

  > What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy

What scares me is the massive incentivization to manipulate the results.

With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations?

Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.

Reminds me of this gem:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...

Straight of of x-files s02e03

accuracy hasn't been their priority for a while now - they just want people to click on ads

Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.

Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought and wasn't influenced by this AI blurb, but I think seeing an answer at the very top state so matter-of-factly that one is definitely better and present it as though everyone thinks that will definitely influence a lot of people. It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...

> It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...

You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.

Since the best resource is personal recommendations, got any entry level cheap IEM recommendations?

Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile

The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...

I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.

Not gp but I really like the sound of my GK Kuntens and 7Hz Zero2s. Both have a rather V-shaped sound signature, some like it and some don't. Though unfortunately the Zero2s feel a bit uncomfortable in my ears when using them for longer

Most of the ones that are over 50 can last a lot of time and have good enough sounds. But the most important stuff are the tips and the cable. Make sure the former fits (just buy a pack) and the latter is thick and braided. Some cheapo ones send every rubbing amplified to your ears.

Crinacle is where I got my IEM advice.

> I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought

Why didn’t you tell the robot that, as your query?

I searched something like “top pro vs tea pro se reddit” so I kind of did.

“Kind of”, indeed.

> Please provide 1-5 forum discussions or social media comment threads discussing or comparing x and y.

Well, that’s how I would ask an AI. I wasn’t asking an AI though, I was googling it

Google is “an AI”,

and has been for some time!,

was my point ^.^

I was only intending to use the traditional search engine, the AI was incidental. If I want an AI answer, I will go to it separately. This is better in my mind as optimal queries for each are different.

The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).

At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.

... And some of us would rather have old google

Check out Kagi, or Brave Search.

Some of us would rather have old Usenet, /., reddit & Digg!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Indeed - just earlier this week I read Google AI summarize a query about testosterone, citing 3 sources. The first citation was a link to a NIH study (or of similar repute). Ok great. The second? Two spam (and explicit) websites existing solely to sell penis enlargement pills.

What was worrying is only some of the claims were supported by the linked study, and most of the response content was drawn from the spam sites.

This problem is not limited to Google, it's the core value of mass-marketed LLMs, or isn't it?

Without "random comments", Google wouldn't have anything to say about "does an air purifier help my asthma, if yes: which one?" or "find the problem with this Hibernate annotation".

They also don't make much effort to exclude sloppy sites, to the contrary, they made way more efforts against SEO spam in the time when Google was a search engine, not trying to be an AI "oracle".

I think their end game is that the only metrics relevant for ranking sources are:

- agreeability (works well as a proxy for correctness with many questions!)

- originality, but not in a scientific sense, just to prevent model collapse

- legal factors such as preventing false health claims or similar things, as long as there is legislation against this kind of thing

What scares me are the basic usability fails it still has. Search for a few foreign language words and it will come back with paragraphs upon paragraphs of AI output in that foreign language despite me telling Google in 15 different ways that I don't speak it, nor anything else on the Google page being in that language. How are all their products always made by and for the most narrow minded people on this planet.

Kysely is the name of a typescript query builder and also Finnish for "query".

Recently, it's started answering any search about Kysely with a blob of Finnish. Awesome stuff, guys, great work.

Kyselý is also a Czech word for sour. So you've also got that to look forward to.

Funnily enough, I have the exact opposite problem, where Google likes to give me results in the configured main language even when I do queries in another and actually want results in the other language.

I’ve found it quite unsettling to be served foreign language videos on YouTube automatically dubbed over by Google into English. Just mixed in with the search results.

It's quite unsettling to be served English AI-dubbed videos randomly on Youtube, where the original is another language you normally default to (Japanese) and it's happy to use in most cases. And then you go to the settings for the video to go back to the original and it tells you it is... Chinese (and no, it's really Japanese).

> "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

And half the time, the sources turn out to be sarcastic jokes on reddit.

So the bots are not recognizing the sarcasm font?

Lucky we all added /s so the bots have an easier time understanding it

Yes. "We all" add it. Every time.

I’d expect the sentiment analysis to be better, yes.

If the bots take everything they read at face value, how useful are they really?

I’ve noticed this too. A single result can determine the answer it gives. And removing the content from its context makes it harder to assess. Suddenly it’s “Gemini said …” rather than “some guy in the YouTube comments said”.

The scary bit is the use of the term AI. The "I" implies critical thinking.

For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.

Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.

Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.

But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!

Edit: took the time to write a shorter comment.

> where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website

My experience is that Google's AI summaries tend to be be very heavily reliant on YouTube videos. If there is a YouTube video on the topic, you can bet that's what the source will be, at least for the topics I have searched lately.

And this is the best the results will ever be! There's so many sites now that are themselves just the unreliable output of AI that it will soon be summarising the summary of a summary of an hallucination and presenting it just as confidently as ever.

I love asking AI about blatantly wrong opinions but by people it thinks must be an authority.

To not make this political, let me give you a game example. Right now the dota 2 fandom wiki is abandoned, and it has been vandalized with covert shitposts. One of them was the addition of a 4th attribute called Charisma, which is completely fake. If you ask AI's "What are the main attributes in dota, according to the official wiki", the dumber AI will fall for it, but the smarter AI will know it's wrong, but try hard to hallucinate some sort of valid explanation like claim charisma is from a custom game or a fan suggestion or writing exercise.

Because you said the word >>OFFICIAL<<, they can NEVER straight up just say "The wiki is wrong". They presume authority from a bunch of shitposts.

I ran into one that kept referencing "people", but then I found that it was a single Reddit thread from a couple of years ago about a relatively small and obscure foreign city with 2 replies.

AI is the new “many people are saying”.

Well, you'll be happy to know that most of American media is exactly the same way: 2 people on twitter will generate a "Americans find Widget X is bad"

Wait until you realize half of the sources already are LLM generated diarrhea

The problem of AI eating and regurgitating its own slop is only going to get worse with time. The best datasets are behind us. Future models are going to have to depend on a lot of human intervention.

The open web will die off, and the AI companies will pay people to create private datasets and books that are known to not be slop.

>where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contribution to the results.

Hate to break it to you, but this has been the backbone of "journalism" for the last decade.

Fishing Twitter for takes to fill the "people are saying" box...

I tend to frame questions to google from a programmer point of view - I'm carefully specific. I seem to get good results that way.

What's old is new again lol

altavista is back baby

> when instead it's just aggregating almost random stuff

How do you know that?

Scraping websites is literally what Google does best, stringing together information in the pattern of "some people x, other people y" requires 0 AI and could have been done since forever. I find it implausible that otherwise obviously capable models would be reduced to do something akin to just that.

Oh who cares. We are barely scratching the surface of AI. You all make it sound like it’s been around for 30 years and it sucks. It will only get better. Got to stop throwing up imaginary walls like nothing will improve.

As a counterexample, I've been seeing more "safety rejections" from Claude. Unlike search, being unable to ask _anything_ about botulinum, or details about the recent Copy Fail vulnerability (without giving my fingerprints to Anthropic to become a "verified security researcher") we're only just beginning to see the ways LLM can be used to distort information and its availability.

So you started with ‘highly doubtful’ as a comment, got given lots of examples and instead of assimilating that info you closed your eyes put your fingers in yours ears and said “oh who cares?’ - you’re on team AI regardless eh? That’s fucking weird mate.

Na. Wasn’t given any good examples. People just whining about the same stuff because “oh no I got information that’s former in the same structure that I can tell it’s AI and it makes me feel bad”

That's fine if we aren't destroying existing products to replace them with AI.

People can already use AI mode in google search if they want. "It'll be better later" is a shit reason to kill one product for it.

My grandfather was one of the first people in Canada to own a commercially available chainsaw.

Let me tell you - it didn’t take 30 years for people to figure out that chainsaws were useful.

Yet most of the kids on HN think they write better code than ai and that it’s completely useless and has no place.

LLMs do write code better than many engineers. It’s just the the normal distribution and the way LLMs are built. Just because it doesn’t write better code than above average engineers doesn’t make it useless though.

People that say AI writes better code than them is such a tell but not the one they might think it is.

Whether or not it is worth the cost or second order effects on society is a different discussion.

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