HedyL

To me, those forced Google AI answers are a lot more disconcerting than even all the rest. Sure, publishers always hated content creators, because paying them ate into their profit margins from advertising. However, Google always got most of its content (the indexed webpages) for free anyway, so what exactly was their problem?

Also, how much more energy do these forced AI answers consume, compared with regular search queries? Has anyone done the math?

Furthermore, if many people really loved that feature so much, why not make it opt-in?

At the same time, as many people already pointed out, prioritizing AI-generated answers will probably further disincentivize creators of good original content, which means there will be even less usable material to feed to AI in the future.

Is it really all about pleasing Wall Street? Or about getting people to spend more time on Google itself rather than leave for other websites? Are they really confident that they will all stay and not disappear completely at some point?

The only reason the tool supposedly has value is because the websites are made to be bad on purpose so that they make more money.

Yes, and because, as it appears, AI occasionally ingests content from some of the better websites out there. However, without sources, you'll be unable to check whether that was the case for your specific query or not. At the same time, it is getting more and more difficult for us to access these better websites ourselves (see above), and sadly, incentives for creators to post this type of high-quality content appear to be decreasing as well.

In terms of creativity, this seems almost on par with the ability to convert photos to the style of, say, impressionist paintings or pop art, which has been available in standard photo editing software for many years. These were also impressive gimmicks, but of very limited practical value.

FWIW, years ago, some people who worked for a political think tank approached me for expert input. They subsequently published a report that cited many of the sources I had mentioned, but their recommendations in the report were exactly the opposite of what the cited sources said (and what I had told them myself). As far as I know, there was no GenAI at the time. I think these people were simply betting that no one would check the sources.

This is not to defend the use of AI, on the contrary - I think this shows quite well what sort of people would use such tools.

It is admittedly only tangential here, but it recently occurred to me that at school, there are usually no demerit points for wrong answers. You can therefore - to some extent - “game” the system by doing as much guesswork as possible. However, my work is related to law and accounting, where wrong answers - of course - can have disastrous consequences. That's why I'm always alarmed when young coworkers confidently use chatbots whenever they are unable to answer a question by themselves. I guess in such moments, they are just treating their job like a school assignment. I can well imagine that this will only get worse in the future, for the reasons described here.

In any case, I think we have to acknowledge that companies are capable of turning a whistleblower's life into hell without ever physically laying a hand on them.

I would argue that such things do happen, the cult "Heaven's Gate" probably being one of the most notorious examples. Thankfully, however, this is not a widespread phenomenon.

Yes, even some influential people at my employer have started to peddle the idea that only “old-fashioned” people are still using Google, while all the forward-thinking people are prompting an AI. For this reason alone, I think that negative examples like this one deserve a lot more attention.

From the original article:

Crivello told TechCrunch that out of millions of responses, Lindy only Rickrolled customers twice.

Yes, but how many of them received other similarly "useful" answers to their questions?

After reading the review linked above, I have a strong suspicion that this comment really nails it: https://mastodon.cloud/@[email protected]/111892343079408715

It's not intended to convince an outsider to believe as it is to shore up the belief of a believer who is starting to doubt.

IIRC, some people pointed out at the time that this particular trade was quite sophisticated - probably orchestrated by people who knew what they were doing and who understood that the hedge fund they wrecked had acted in a particularly dumb/risky way. I guess with this kind of information, another hedge fund could have pulled that off just as easily as the people from WSB on Reddit.

Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a "leveraged long" bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It's important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody's pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn't expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.

Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it's impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.

Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.

IMHO, the only way to "win" here is not to play.