Degenerative AI - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In an attempt to catch up with Google, a company that has successfully destroyed its popular search product through sheer force of greed, Microsoft invested a further $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI (six days after laying off 10,000 people), hoping to make its own search engine Bing better, or more popular, but certainly not more profitable. The net result is a search engine with narcissistic personality disorder, responding to user queries with emotionally manipulative and outright false claims.
The problem with these AI-powered search engines is that they do not have consistent results. Both Google’s Bard AI and Bing AI had obvious errors in their first demos, largely in part because they are, from what I can tell, making their best guess every time. As a result, Bing couldn’t tell the difference between a cordless or corded vacuum cleaner, or correctly interpret financial reports - tasks that one would not expect Bing or Google to do, unless the CEOs of both companies made statements about them being able to do so and then showed the world them trying to do so in a demo for the press.
In a vacuum, these are minor errors. They are obvious problems that could be overshadowed by how cool it is that an AI can do this. But when put in the context of “this is how search engines are going to work going forward,” they are absolutely fucking ridiculous.
