I was looking up the properties of some chemical (as I frequently do) and Google's AI dumped all kinds of stupid-ass useless info I hadn't asked for on me. Unfortunately, I can't remember what the actual search was for -- I wish I did ! But let's say I was searching for the melting point of salt, for example. The easy way to do that would be to type "melting point of sodium chloride" into Google's search field, and expect it to return links to tables or databases that include the melting points of common chemicals, with maybe the actual mp front and center. Instead I got a "summary" that resembled the 'core dump' I've seen students put on chemistry tests when they don't really know what the answer is -- they just write down everything they've memorized on that particular topic (or something resembling it) and expect the grader (me) to piece together the correct answer from bits and pieces in there and give them a high score. In fact, *recognizing* which part of the answer is correct and which is just rote-memorized irrelevant info is how you earn points, and since I'm the one doing the recognizing and they're clearly not, I, the grader, get all the points and they get none. Information on the history of salt, major producers of salt, cultural aspects of salt -- none of which have a damn thing to do with the mp. But right in the middle of all that -- which may have included a fair amount of actual correct facts, for all I know -- was something just totally, completely off -- like "salt is completely insoluble in water" or "salt is highly flammable". Not merely technically wrong, or wrong by degree, but totally counterfactual. Looking in no way distinct from other info that might have been at least partially right. That was not an auspicious debut for Google AI, and I quickly found ways to disable it in searches. Which has saved a lot of energy, just as a bonus -- AI sucks up a lot of electrical power to produce its idiot-savant "answers", which can be pretty heavy on the "idiot" part. So please, Google, stop burning coal to feed me trash "information". Your search engine has gone pretty downhill in recent years, and adding AI was like stepping off a cliff in that regard.
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