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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much everywhere. AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.

I started to find that the AI bit was the most useful part of Google Search. But the actual search results were terrible and now I use Kagi. I like being able to add a question mark and control what becomes AI and what doesn't. I use normal search like a Ctrl F for the internet and don't want it to be too clever.

My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".

There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.

Yeah. AI slop is lying to people. When I realised that I disabled it. Thankfully there are browser extensions that do that easily.

People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.

That difference can be pretty small when most of the web is also consumed by low effort automatically generated slop. You can't escape it. I know there is a good web out there, but the search engines refuse to give it to me. Probably their algorithm. preferring recent content over good content.

I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.

Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either.

Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/why-googles-ai-cant-spell-...

I fail to understand why people think LLMs working in tokens (and thus having a hard time counting letters) is such a huge gotcha. Ask it to write you a bash script that counts the amount of p's in a word you input it'll do it fine. Then ask it to write that script in C, JavaScript, Lua, and a few other languages. Then ask your family members to do the same. The gotcha can go both ways.

LLMs are directly marketed as not requiring understanding of how it works.

The PR is "Its magic!"

So people try to treat it like magic, and don't like when it detonates a fireball in a room that is too small.

Not requiring technical knowledge is the selling point. That it doesn't need you to think.

Questions like this are irrational though. Nobody wants to know how many of a type of letter are in a word. Ask it a real question from your real life that needs a real answer it's fairly magic at getting the correct answer. And if you don't think so at this point my guess is you simply haven't used it enough.

Counting letters in words is absolutely a real question. Its trivia!

Half our TV is made up of trivia, and being able to generate trivia answer/question pairs is something both TV, and pubs, will try to do.

Imagine seeing this as a jeapordy question. What is 2 Rs.

LLMs have some limitations same as humans. The limitations are very different between the two which is why LLMs are very useful to us. I personally can't write a perfectly functional fairly complex webpage in less than 30 seconds, but I can count letters. I'll let the LLM make the webpage and keep count of the letters for a trivia contest if needed.

Also get the latest version of chatgpt (extended thinking) to make you a 'tiptop 100% verified Trivia stack for (x TV show)' and you'll get better than what most pubs will come up with. I did this for the simpsons when someone said it couldn't be done because that sounded like something an LLM would be excellent at. Turns out I was right.

Because it proves they are not, in fact, intelligent and do not, in fact, have any understanding of what they are doing. It's really obvious what people think it's a huge gotcha: because it is.

Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.

This is fascinating, contrarian viewpoints are rare, so can you elaborate?

Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.

So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.

Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.

We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.

In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.

I think that's foolish engagement with the technology though. Never panic, always double check. I don't take it as factual. It's just a statistical summary of something it read and it must always be treated as such. In your case, why not just ask 5 other AI's and take a poll?

> But the actual search results were terrible

I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.

Google search already had a huge quality slide before 2022.

AI was ever useful for searching stuff?

I find that those "AI summaries" google tends to use by default, are hallucinating liars. I stopped wasting my time with this AI slop spam in general. Any "human" still using AI and targeting me, gets perma-banned without any further discussion. I kind of need ublock origin for EVERYTHING. (Ublock origin is great, but I need this on every level, blocking AI slop spam, blocking Nate's donation-daemon nag-widget for KDE and so forth - ok, the last one is easy to disable, just patching out the part where Nate thinks it is ok to harass people, but for AI slop spam from external sites I need something more effective than ublock origin, kind of like an ublock colossal shield.)

I find it takes me more time... sometimes it has the answer, often it has pure bullshit. I need to verify everything that comes out of it myself before repeating at anyway.

If people are just naked copy-pasting that field... which, ugh, of course they are... they are doing themselves and others a disservice.

Hey, don't forget about all the programmers who are excited to help destroy their own livelihoods for no extra compensation.

I think that a lot of those overly enthusiastic engineer AI fanboys are just playing a rational game driven by their perception that AI is a effective substitute for them, and that the only way to survive the comming culling is by being seen on the market as something an AI thought leader.

Basically, signalling that they are going to be cooperative subjects for the enemy's occupation of the land.

"I, for one, welcome our new giant insect overlords" is, IMHO, the operative meme here.

Others are just addicted, the cycle of fast interaction and reward in coding agents is not very different from gambling or crack cocaine.

The rational game here is extremely straightforward, and even has big names like "prisoner's dilemma" behind it:

Unionize.

I like how everyone on HN feels entitled to a profession that hasn't even existed for 100 years and that is constantly changing. Talk about addiction.

Yes, I am addicted to food and shelter and to being able to work in the profession that I specialized in and spent years learning to do well. Without these things I would literally die.

When I was fresh out of college in my 20s I watched two engineers get fired in front of me. They were hired to be DBAs. When I finished rewriting the software into a proper mvc their entire job became redundant since anyone could now make the database edits needed from an admin webpage. And I was better at the DBA part of my full stack role than they were. This is no different.

People need to be independently rich, or be extremelly frugal to not care about the hypothetical obsolescence of their jobs.

What the fuck do you expect? That people just cheer a brave new world of diminishing salaries and disappearing jobs along with some vague promises that every thing will be alright?

Yes, I absolutely do expect computer programmers to cheer as the brave new world they helped create is ushered in.

How many people here got rich by automating away the jobs of others? I mean, what is this? Others are fair game, but programming is sacred? That's quite simply the peak of absurdity.

Every single step in this saga has actually created millions of jobs.

It's pretty funny seeing this play out in the HN comments because I never got any consideration before when I had to learn new frameworks and languages. But suddenly machine learning is the line one should not cross? Playing the world's smallest violin right now.

What industries and professions has software actually made extinct?

The result of most software has been "you do basically the same job except now you do it on a computer"

Computer used to be a job for a cadre of women who did math. That job went away when computers, the physical machine, got enough software that those women were no longer needed.

I think the prevailing mindset amongst developers who use LLMs is that actually LLMs are more of an effective augmentation of programming tools in the same way that an IDE is, and the marketing angle comes from perceived demand for that augmented skill set.

Many developers even seem to predict an increase in demand in the medium to long term as AI written systems increasingly begin to need human attention.

I think the hyper enthusiastic ones are more vocal, but there's a quieter and larger group who are somewhat more measured about it.

Pretty wild to see this in a technology forum. The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. Have you ever wondered how many livelihoods computer programmers have destroyed? Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

> The whole idea of technology is to do more with less. It inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable

I don't think either of these sentences is true.

> Now that programming itself is on the chopping block, suddenly some moral line has been crossed?

I didn't say anything about a moral line, I just said that there are a lot of programmers who are very excited to remove themselves from being employable. I didn't even say whether I thought that was good or bad!

>The whole idea of technology is to do more with less

No, that's not the whole idea of technology. Technology exists to, and this is a non-exhaustive list: fostering creativity, play, enabling autonomy and self sufficiency, connecting people to each other, collaboration, building skills and enhancing people's natural capacities. That's a smalls et of examples of what one could imagine technology to do.

Are these AI tools connecting people, genuinely enhancing their capacity to think, increasing or diminishing their creativity and self-sufficiency? The answer looks pretty obvious to me.

People who think technology is something to be used to "do more" and then discarded have no actual interest in technology as an object of study, or as a set of pro-social tools. That's not the mentality of a hacker. Why would it surprise you that people on a website called hackernews don't have the same attitude as a guy in an MBA class?

It absolutely is. Technology is what lets you farm more with less resources. Manufacture more with less materials. Get more things done in less time. Fostering creativity and play? Yeah, by getting more things done in less time, so as to free up that time for all the fun stuff you actually want to do. Of course, to others this "fun stuff" is just yet another inefficiency to be eliminated.

We might love technology and think it has intrinsic value, but the rest of the world could not care less. It's about maximizing profits and minimizing costs. That includes the costs of human labor. No hacker here thinks of the amazon mechanical turk employees that AI will certainly get rid of, for example. I bet the hackers here will be at their most self-satisfied when they finally manage to replace doctors.

So it is indeed pretty rich to read complaints on so called Hacker News about hacking itself being automated away by AI models. It's a very arrogant perspective. Did hackers think they were above this? Did they think they were irreplaceable? Hilarious.

chatgpt alone had like ~900 million weekly active users last i checked.

thats a lot of c-suites

(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)

Theres a difference between users seeking out AI, and PMs cramming AI into previously existing products.

i obviously agree that those are two different things.

but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.

That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.

they have 50MM non-business subscribers, if that’s a better metric for you. and that’s just one ai company - not counting the others or local models.

i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.

anything else with 50MM subscribers would reasonably be called “popular”.

I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.

Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.

AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.

My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.

I don't think you understand that there's a difference between a user who wants an AI chatbot and a user who wants to perform a web search, and even if they're the exact same user, they expect for a web search to operate like a web search and not like a chatbot.

I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.

my comment is literally only pushing back on the claim of "ai is not popular".

by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.

your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.

I use ChatGPT on occasion for certain tasks. But when I'm doing a web search, I want a web search without AI.

same!

my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.

just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.

A lot of people who are fed up with AI use ChatGPT. Being fed up with something doesn't necessarily mean they start pretending it doesn't exist.

Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

>Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users

Sure but how do those map to real people?

Anecdote: Most of the anti-AI sentiment I hear is from internet communities like BlueSky. I don't find this generalizable.

Bluesky is insufferable. Literally any issue in any program is labelled "#vibecoded" by these clearly genius-level engineers who've never shipped a bug.

Well, the AIs are supposed to find and fix the bugs too. So now what's our excuse?

There are quite a lot of anti-AI sentiments expressed here.

Seems like AI is the Ozempic of tech. IE token generation keeps soaring, yet if you ask any individual- many swear they aren't touching it.

The only delusion here is your comment. Claude and ChatGPT are extremely popular across millions of active daily users.

You're not wrong. I'm forever cleaning up the turds they leave everywhere.

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