Comment by ajkjk
9 hours ago
I know people love to hate on the AI overviews, and I'm a person who generally hates both google and AI. But--I see them as basically good and ideal. After all most of the time I am googling something like trivial, like a simple fact. And for the last decade when I have to click into sites for the information it's some SEO spam-ridden garbage site. So I am very glad to not have to interact with those anymore.
Of course Google gets little credit for this since it was their own malfeasance that led to all the SEO spam anyway (and the horrible expertsexchange-quality tech information, and stupid recipe sites that put life stories first)... but at least there now there is a backpressure against some of the spammy crap.
I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying? Or more likely applying some serious negative bias to the pattern they're reporting. The overviews are wrong sometimes, yes, but surely it is like 10% of the time, not always. Probably they're biased because they're generally mad at google, or AI being shoved in their face in general, and I get that... but you don't make the case against google/AI stronger by misrepresenting it; it is a stronger argument if it's accurate and resonates with everyones' experiences.
> -I see them as basically good and ideal. After all most of the time I am googling something like trivial, like a simple fact. And for the last decade when I have to click into sites for the information it's some SEO spam-ridden garbage site.
What good is it if the overviews lie some percentage of the time (your own guess is 10%) and you have to search to verify that they aren't making shit up anyway. Also, those SEO spam-ridden garbage sites google feeds you whenever you bother to look past the undependable AI summaries are mostly written by AI these days and prone to the same problem of lying which only makes fact checking google's auto-bullshitter even harder.
> I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
No one remembers when AI Overview gets the answer right (it's expected to do so after all) but everyone has their favorite examples of "oh stupid AI."
That's incomplete, because another "nobody remembers" is when the hallucination differs from reality, but the reader doesn't promptly detect the problem and remember where they got it from.
Think about the urban legends in the style of "the average person eats X spiders per year." It's extremely unlikely that Rumor Patient Zero is in a position to realize it's wrong, or that they will inform the next person that it came from an LLM summary.