this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

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[–] [email protected] 214 points 1 year ago (62 children)

The part about Google isn't wrong.

But the second half of the article, where he says that AI chatbots will replace Google search because they give more accurate information, that simply is not true.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Even if AI magically got to the point of providing accurate and good results, I would still profoundly object to using it.

First, it's a waste of resources. The climate impact of AI is enough of a reason why we should leave it dead until we live in a world with limitless energy and water.

Second, I don't trust a computer to select my sources for me. Sometimes you might have to go through a few pages, but with traditional search engines at least you are presented with a variety of sources and you can use your god given ability of critical thinking.

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

I don't trust a computer to select my sources for me.

I’m not sure what you think modern search engines do, but this is pretty much it. Hell, all of the popular ones have been using AI signals for years.

You can request as many sources from an AI as you would get from Google.

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

Of course there are always challenges, especially with how results are ranked. I have been extremely dissatisfied with the development of search engines for years now. I find Duckduckgo to at least be less bad than Google. Currently I'm checking out Kagi, which at least lets me rank sources myself. Still on the fence though - it does seem to flirt more with AI than with transparency, which has me worried.

But absolutely, it's not that I think the current state of search engines is great either - it just seems to me everything is getting worse and the Internet has entered a death spiral between AI and the enshittification of social media.

Then again, maybe I just reached that age where you start hating everything.

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