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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up.

She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.

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tbh I also use google AI tools frequently. It’s convenient (search bar is top of my window), and extremely fast at generation. For quick Qs, opening a chat bot and changing the default reasoning from my coding settings, switching from Work to Chat, etc etc, is too much of a faff.

I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.

Surely there's an extension for whatever browser you are using?

  Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-ai-overviews/
  Chromium: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn
  Safari: Seems there are none

Google Search's AI has gotten... better. But it's still frequently spouting as much made up shit as I expected from LLMs not doing their research a couple years ago.

Just this morning I looked up what time today's Nintendo Direct livestream is. It correctly told me it's today at 7am PT (confirmed from actual link sources). It then tried to get smart and tell me what that would be in my city's timezone and it was an hour off (possibly because I'm in a timezone without daylight savings)

Yes it's definitely not SOTA, and is worse than all the chatbots I use. But it's correct frequently enough that the convenience + speed does it for me.

My mom texted me the following when Windows did some big update integrating AI and probably had one of those menu bar popups announce it:

“Sharkweek, my computer says it has AI on it now!?? Yikes! What does that mean?”

This happend to me too. What does it mean, indeed? Yikes!

“Is that just what AI says?”

‘No, it’s from $majorAmericanCorporation.’ look at screen, see $majorAmericanCorporation name in a pill as citation you can click on within the Google AI Overview

Thanks Google!

I use that google AI overview a lot but I’m still using ChatGPT for 80% of my queries now.

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