First off it’s the International Day of SLAYER, as well as Tom Araya’s birthday – crank it up LOUD today!
So yesterday I didn’t do as well at staying off social media – seems there was quite the falling out between Trump and Elon Musk and it was all done publicly for the whole world to see. So, since I do happen to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude I watched… and I watched others watch. I had a topic I was going to write about, but this seems to be a bit more timely.
No, fuck that. All that is a distraction – whether or not it is a coordinated diversion (anyone talking about Palantir’s massive surveillance database right now?) or just two of the most narcissistic egos on the planet arguing, it is all pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things – though some of the conspiracy theories popping up are interesting. (The most interesting one to me is that the falling out occurred because of the 10-year AI regulation moratorium by any level of government except federal.)
Anyhow, I wanted to talk about trust. Not general trust, like you trust your spouse or friends, but trust in systems and in particular, the companies that employ algorithms to serve content to consumers. At one point, I felt comfortable trusting the Google search engine. I put in search parameters, and it spit out the results. Sure, you’d sometimes have to click a few of the links to find what you were looking for, but at the time, Google was just that – a search engine that collated data from websites and let you search them all simultaneously.
Enter search engine optimization (SEO) – in my opinion, this was the beginning of the fall. Now, when Google crawled your site, there were specific things it was looking for. In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad – it looked to see if you were link bombing or keyword spamming, how many incoming links your site had, and things like that to weed out sites trying to game the system. That was fine, but just like the frog in the pot, things were just starting to heat up.
Paid ads began appearing before search results, then news articles in a sidebar block. Now we have social media pages taking priority over actual websites, hidden behind AI slop that is often incorrect, and sometimes dangerous. The actual search results are practically nonexistent anymore, and it’s gotten so bad, they are being sued.
“While Google has long displayed answers and information directly in search results, AI overviews take this a step further by extracting content from external sites and rewording it in a way that positions Google more as a publisher than a search engine.”
– Lily Ray, New York-based SEO expert
To top this off, a recent survey by WalletHub showed declining trust in the search results provided by Google – but that may even be intentional… to sell more ads.
“Since Google doesn’t have any real competition, it can make the best information hard to find, forcing users to stay on Google for longer and interact with more ads. This is dangerous for consumers, most of whom think the best results appear first.”
– Odysseas Papadimitrou, WalletHub CEO
So we can’t trust the search results, we can’t trust the AI summary, and really, can we trust Google at all? But this isn’t isolated to just Google – other companies deploying AI are having similar issues with bad AI results. I spent time playing with Duck.AI – DuckDuckGo’s AI search assistant (you can choose from 5 different ones, but I did most of my testing with GPT-4o mini) – and have yet to get a decent response. I was looking for some song lyrics, and the model kept spitting out incorrect answers. I would correct the model, and try to refine the search, but eventually it would start regurgitating the same incorrect answers. I eventually started asking it questions about songs I knew, just trying to get a correct answer. I’d tell it a band name and general theme of the song and then a specific verse I was trying to identify. I had zero luck with any of the models.
So if AI searching is so flawed, what is the purpose? My thought is that they are rolling this out now to 1) help train the models, 2) intentionally make searching more difficult and increase ad exposure, and 3) to get the consumer used to AI being everywhere and involved with everything you do. I no longer trust the search results, and I absolutely do not trust AI results.
So what is there to do? For starters, switching search engines is easy enough – I primarily use DuckDuckGo now, and occasionally Brave. There are also extensions available to block the AI Overviews, and relatively simple ways to turn off AI scanning of your Gmail and other services. I use an old version of Twitter on my phone and not on desktop, but you previously could turn off data sharing with Grok as well.
But wait… there’s more!
On top of not trusting search engines, AI, and social media – can you trust the media? Of course not – these days they are no longer about providing news, they are all about selling you something, be it an idea, a political view, or a product. Trust in the media is at an all time low because they ran with complete bullshit stories and lost all credibility – Trump is compromised by Russia (c’mon guys, we all know it’s really Israel), Biden had no cognitive decline and was sharp as a tack, and of course the big one about Hunter Biden’s laptop being fake. When you know something is true, and someone tells sells you blatantly opposing information – you lose trust. And that’s where we are at today.
So who can you trust? People – individual people. I trust individual people who have in some way been vetted (years known, previous interactions, information provided, etc) or even just a good vibe when meeting face to face (though that sure worked out well when picking a contractor). I no longer have trust in institutions because they are filled with unvetted people, and should I ever reach the point where I have vetted enough members of the institution, the trust would still be in the people, not the institution.
So what can we do? Meet people in the real world. Get offline and turn off social media. Go out in the world and meet people – talk to them, spend time with them, get to know them. Do things in the real world. Take off your shoes and touch grass.
Anyhow, that’s enough for today – I need to go outside and touch grass.
Interesting Tidbits
Is Google making search worse to sell more ads? – “As Google faces the prospect of a court-ordered breakup following a recent monopoly ruling, new research suggests the tech giant’s declining search quality may be a deliberate strategy to boost advertising revenue at the expense of consumer experience.”
Google Search Results Study & Survey – “Lots of consumers start their research for the best financial products on Google, which makes the quality of Google’s results extremely important to people’s financial wellbeing. To help people make informed decisions, WalletHub evaluated popular credit card and banking terms searched by consumers to see if Google is really returning the best results. We also conducted a nationally-representative survey to see how consumers feel.”
How to turn off Gemini in your Gmail, Docs, Photos, and more – “Are you frustrated by Google’s seeming insistence on injecting Gemini into everything? There’s a way out.”
Google is killing the web with AI Overviews – I made an extension to block them – “Find out how to get rid of AI overviews and other unwanted parts of search.”
Anthropic researchers predict a ‘pretty terrible decade’ for humans as AI could wipe out white collar jobs – “The discourse around AI job losses has been heating up recently, with some major tech figures acknowledging that the technology will have at least some effect on desk jobs.”
How does the union-busting industry work? – Wait, people get PAID for talking shit about unions?
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