It would probably be hated even more as all of those points would be magnitudes higher in volume than they are today. It’s what is wanted by corporations, a cheap surveillance tool that closely monitors everyone to keep everyone in line. There are multiple dimensions to this issue. I think AI should have stayed in R&D for a while longer. It is so half baked, but unfortunately trusted as an “expert” by people who may not be familiar with hunting down primary trustworthy sources. Though that last point is nothing new. I think it should have never been used for things like scanning private/personal files or to accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit. These companies are buying their own bullshit and are trusting/betting on AI to reduce the most costly component of their company, the labor force. It’s all just smoke and mirrors though, always has been. It’s not like these things are gods among us, but they are sold that way. In the end, not matter what, with the current state of AI or if they were cheaper to use computationally, the bubble will burst. At least when that happens, maybe some of the left overs can be repurposed for actual useful things for society, but I don’t have my hopes up at the moment.

Their main audience isn’t the end user, but the shareholders. All that matters is they can say they are still “growing”. Which is why they don’t care about making things worse. Same goes for Meta. If something succeeds, it’s a happy accident secondary to the goal. Each of these companies did have a good initial idea that was fundamentally good and better than the competition, but ultimately will not last forever for reasons like this. Something else will eclipse them in time. History is full of corpses the likes of these companies. Recent tech ones include IBM, HP, and Microsoft. All big (or moderately big) players today sure, but not what they were at their prime and not close to the “main” ones anymore.

Even people who use AI in search would fall into that trap. The output is one thing, how you take it is another. I sounds like people mostly don’t check sources, which is the biggest problem. Not saying that person does or doesn’t check sources. Aside from that, Google forcing AI into search is fundamentally the opposite of their business model. If they don’t direct people to sites to buy stuff, how do they expect the sites that they are scrapping to survive? So they scrap and don’t pay and kill the source due to excessive energy demands? Only like Amazon could survive that. Google’s search should be a utility and Google should be broken up. In the meantime, I highly recommend people use DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Kagi (paid), or any other search engine that hasn’t been on a mission to destroy SEO in favor of advertising and AI.

Yea, and the main discovery being transformers (GPT predecessor). That allowed for the groundbreaking technology of AlphaFold to come into being, for which a Nobel prize was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (who just left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic).

Let me start off by saying I think Google should be broken up. I really don’t like that company. But I and glad that the publicized research that they have done has lead to benefits for humanity. Like they discovered the underlying technology behind GPTs, being transformers back in 2017. And then an extension on that being AlphaFold. I think those applications are great, like some others for the use of AI. I don’t think that using AI to call people criminals and lock them out of their account is a good use of the technology, and then not budging when those people are found innocent (there are many news articles on that topic). Google needs to be broken up and their search made into a public utility.

Bit rot happens to digital copies. It’s slower than what happens to physical copies, but over long enough time can also lead to data loss.