Google search is useless.
I know this will surprise you young whippersnappers, but back in the day, if you typed something in the Google search bar, it would look for and bring up documents that used those words. This was a very useful feature. It didn't bring up any sponsored pages, ads or inane commentary supplied by the "AI."
If you typed
generals gathered masses just like witches
It would find the lyric sheet for the song "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, and because those words all appear in the first few lines, that would be in the first page of results.
A couple of days ago, I typed
the winter life is coming back
expecting the algorithm to name the song by the group Cream that contains the line. This is what I got.
 |
| Screenshot of search and results |
In other words, the AI just started arguing with me about whether the line in the query bar was true or not!
The song turns out to be, as I'm sure you're all eager to tell me, "Deserted Cities of the Heart" by Cream.
I asked Google what it thought it was doing, and it replied, in part:
 |
| Screenshot |
And this - Google's own AI's answer - is wrong, or at best highly misleading.
"bacon eggs" written that way does not find pages containing both words. It finds pages where the words "bacon eggs" appear in exactly that order. (For example, "Serve it with bacon, eggs, and toast.")
To find pages where both bacon and eggs appear but not necessarily together in that order (for example, "people like to eat bacon with eggs"), you would have to type the words without quotation marks, as below:
bacon eggs
On Twitter, oh I'm sorry X, these days, I see a huge percentage of people answering a Tweet by asking Grok, Twitter's sorry X's AI, to explain what the Tweet meant, or if the Tweet was "true." Depending on the phrasing, Grok will say different things to different people. A whole host - millions of queries - using lakes' worth of water and thousands of dollars worth of electricity - of utterly useless questions and even more useless answers, many of which are probably taken as gospel by the question asker.
No good can come of this. The incredible investment in AI cannot pay off for the companies building out capacity and pinning their business plans on some fairytale of return. A 2000-style dot com crash is imminent. The only lasting effect of AI will be dumbed-down people fighting in their bunkers for their interpretation of everything based on idiomatic peculiarities in their queries. One hopes (with little confidence) that the fighting will remain virtual and not spill into the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment