Comment by em-bee
6 days ago
the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills
how?
errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
google would be right to remove all AI results from germany
i'd consider that a win.
By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value.
If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.
LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.
If google didn't intend it's answers to be taken at face value it would just present the citations in a list of links rather than generating an answer.
Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
The AI summary is still useful for narrowing down the results, even if you fully check the citations.
> Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.
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If you re-read the article, you might see that it mentions that the citations do not necessarily cover the AI summary. The linked pages do not make the claims that the AI summary makes. That is the context of the ruling. Google made up the claims, and provided false citations. They are not, in fact, providing a summary, but a whole new narrative. Therefore they own it.
I read the article and I’m aware of the failure modes of Google’s AI summary. They’re actually one of the worst in the space on this shit which is why I don’t use Gemini and it’s fine that they get slapped for this, but what I was responding to initially was this:
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
Because if someone goes through the citations and it doesn’t substantiate what was generated, then what was generated was obviously bollocks. Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill to using LLMs with web search at all. It’s not rocket science.
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Important for whom exactly? If it's you who are called convicted pedo by Google AI summary, it's you who has vital interest in additional research but not me who reads it. There's intentions mismatch. Which probably would destroy your life, and you won't call it "entertainment" then, I think.
Strawmen are for scaring off the crows, not discussion fodder. Take it out to the farm where it belongs.
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But you are not doing a 2 hour rabbit hole search when you stand in front of a T-shirt and check whether it is fair traded or all-american produced.
If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt.
Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.
Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.
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