Comment by tokioyoyo
5 months ago
If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles.
So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.
I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything...
With what Google has become, I can't blame her.
You'll likely be OK until Claude gets a penis. Then you're toast.
Just replacing one software with another... That's not really the issue, unless you're talking about hallucinations.
Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any standard search engine.
Because the responses are often distilled down from the same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts.
I use Claude a lot. I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models.
But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as a general purpose replacement for Google unless you specifically prompt it to search.
3 replies →
Google search sucks now because it's been targeted by the spammers and content farms. Before that happened it was pretty good. LLMs will eventually be poisoned the same way, whether by humans or other LLMs.
Garbage in, garbage out + chat bots will be monetized which means they will show you things their ad partners want you to see vs what you actually want.
frankly I've found even chat gpt free to be more useful when looking for something - I'd describe what I'm looking for, what are must-have features, what I definitely don't mean, etc and it'll suggest a few things. This has rarely led to not finding what I'm looking for. it's absolutely superior to Google search these days for things that have been around a while. I wouldn't check the news with it.
A more sophisticated replacement for search engines seems like one of the more positive use cases for chatbots to me.
What am I missing?