'Dangerous and alarming': Google removes some of its AI summaries after users' health put at risk

[EarlG]

5. It's weird how big corps think that slapping the word "AI" on everything means people won't notice their product is shit

Google used to be the best search engine out there. Now it produces results that are frequently incorrect, and as seen in the article above, potentially life threatening. (And they haven't even started seeding these overviews with paid advertising yet, at which point the results will be even more worthless. Having heart palpitations? Let our AI explain to you in an extremely convincing voice why the best medicine is Coca-Cola.)

But because they slap the word "AI" on it, we're all supposed to thoughtfully stroke our chins and assume that "the future is here," and now all we have to do is wait for that future to truly arrive and unburden us from our daily grind. Meanwhile their products get worse and worse, electricity costs go up, the environment is further ruined, and billions upon billions of dollars disappear upwards into the pockets of the already mega-wealthy.

The sad part is that depending on what you use it for, machine learning can be extremely useful. But what the big corps are doing is throwing everything under the same "AI" umbrella, and forcing the tech to be used in situations where it is not useful, to do things it is not good at.

I wonder how long it will take before the majority of people associate the label "AI" with the thought, "shit, broken product, don't use it."