this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
769 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

64937 readers
3989 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning "to find things on the Internet." Soon, Google might just tell you what's on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.

This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.

With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it's only the start of Google's plans for AI search.

Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It's launching as an opt-in feature via Google's Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

Unlike most of Lemmy, I actually like AI and even I don't want this.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (4 children)

How many cases of "You should eat at least one small rock per day" AI bullshit does Google think is acceptable for production deployment?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I was just dealing with a plumbing problem the other day, and I was like, “I know, I’ll ask AI!”

Basically everything it told me was completely wrong. And this was Claude Sonnet 3.7, one of the best!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

thinking google is about offering you a quality search at this point is like thinking facebook is about improving your social experience. they both started like that and that's how they hooked people up. but they have their own interests now. those interests revolve around affecting how people act and think. one central thing they need to do to fulfil those interests is controlling what people see and know... and that's very hard to do when this pesky external content generated by other that is hard to control gets into way...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They always had their own interests. If you thought otherwise, you're naive. People generally start a business to make money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

maybe i am naive, maybe you are cynical.

some people do somerimes start business cause they have a good product in mind..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Oh I'm definitely cynical, sometimes too much so, but its often warranted.

You're right, though, just because the (vast) majority are money grabs doesnt mean they all are. Lots of businesses are started by someone trying to figure out how to make a living doing something they love. Or genuinely trying to solve a problem, money being secondary. I've never had that drive, but I do know e.g. artists who are "in business" for themselves and quite happy at it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Dear Google,

Literally no one wants this.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Nope. Plenty of people want this.

In the last few years I've seen plenty of cases where CS undergrad students get stumped if ChatGPT is unable to debug/explain a question to them. I've literally heard "idk because ChatGPT can't explain this lisp code" as an excuse during office hours.

Before LLMs, there were also a significant amount of people who used GitHub issues/discord to ask simple application usage questions instead of Googling. There seems to be a significant decrease of people's willingness to search for an answer regardless of AI tools existing.

I wonder if it has to do with weaker reading comprehension skills?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Technology Connections posted a very great video about this recently. Algorithms are breaking how people think and lulling them into complacency, losing the ability to think, research, discern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I think it's simply that getting a direct answer is easier than reading different forums with different views and come up with your idea. That doesn't mean people want google search to stop searching. We have gemini, if I want to use gemini I can go to gemini. I don't get why everything has to be AI. We can have multiple tools, not everything out there is a nail.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish, but now it’s Google doing it to the World Wide Web.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

...hmm that's kind of shitty and it uses ten times more energy! Let's go full enshitification!

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 87 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Technofascists really benefit from certain kinds of information being inaccessible…

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 days ago (1 children)

fascists really love LLM's. like ridiculously in love with them. it's where all their 'art' comes from. it's made of the shallow aesthetics with no interiority they love so much. plus it doesn't really require articulating your desires much, or having artists.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.

You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).

You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

yeah. letting silicon valley build the sword with which to slay the dragon Truth was really some 'neon genesis evangellion' grade bullshit. posadism hasn't failed in this timeline, though. fingers crossed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I’m stoned so:

The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)

COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.

Luigi is Kaworu, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.

The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.

Rei is obviously the internet/technology.

The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I'm decrepit enough to remember pre-Google web, with competing search engines. Bring back webrings!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Altavista baby.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

sometimes you just gotta ask Jeeves

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn't an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Please! We need more competition for Google.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago

Capitalism. Next question...

[–] [email protected] 206 points 3 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (18 children)

Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?

Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?

Government - fucked.

Education - fucked.

Healthcare - fucked.

Environment - fucked.

Housing - fucked.

Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.

Wealth Inequality - fucked.

Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.

Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.

Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.

[–] [email protected] 156 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Don't forget about housing! Can't even have shelter from the elements without paying through the nose to some rent-raising billionaire or giant corporation...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Updated! :)

load more comments (16 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is exactly why I'm working so hard to eradicate the verb "to google" from my vocabulary. I switched to DuckDuckGo (which then started providing AI summaries, but allowed an easy opt-out).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Even better, use the google verb to refer to searching anywhere other than Google and effectively genericide it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 days ago

I am no longer feeling lucky

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Number one reason to at least distance oneself from the big G. They shove unwanted shit down your throat despite the loud protesters

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wait, google does searches now too? Wow they have a service for everything.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 days ago (3 children)

The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 85 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 days ago

Sounds cool, can’t wait!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (8 children)

startpage. you're welcome.

it's also not us owned or based.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 days ago (1 children)

AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›