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The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
Screenshots of Google’s AI search going awry have gone repeatedly viral and highlight how hellbent the company is on giving its customers the most frustrating possible user experience while casually destroying the livelihoods of people who work for or make websites. They also highlight the fact that Google’s AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge, it is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past indiscriminately scraped from the internet and (sometimes) remixed to look like something plausibly new and “intelligent.”
Seems the origin of the Google AI’s conclusion was an 11 year old Reddit post by the eminent scholar, fucksmith. https://t.co/fG8i5ZlWtl pic.twitter.com/0ijXRqA16y
— Kurt Opsahl @kurt@mstdn.social (@kurtopsahl) May 23, 2024
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet. It is an indictment of Google’s artificial “intelligence,” not of Reddit or of the internet’s shitposters.