The Internet being mostly broken at this point is driving me a little insane, and I can’t believe that people who have the power to keep a functioning search engine for themselves wouldn’t go ahead and do it.
I wonder about this every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is. Like, is there some secret useful AI out there that plebs like me don’t get to use? Because otherwise, huh?
I think yes, and no. There are certainly in-house tools that the outside folks don’t get. LLMs for sure have better tiers and loosened guardrails.
…buuuuut, the people at an ‘executive’ level also are entirely unlike you and me. They are simultaneously as gullible and foolish as the ‘sheep’ of society, who are also buying into the ‘AI’ hype of LLMs, and so far removed from our situation that even using an LLM or search engine is entirely outside of their experience. They aren’t going to be using an LLM to plan out a vacation or a work schedule and have it fail any more than they would have looked through a SEO optimized bullshit website about vacuum cleaners (or super slideshow-ified list of ‘top ten pacific vacations!’ website to show you a bunch of ads) five years ago. They’ll ask the LLM (/search engine and only look at the ai at top) for the best pacific vacations and then tell their assistant to plan a vacation for them based on a quick glance at the result (or the same for the vacuum cleaner to replace the one that broke when their house cleaner was trying to get the super long hair from the super fru-fru breed that’s only allowed in two rooms in the house out of the super luxurious thick rug).
The way they use the LLM is perfectly fine for them. They aren’t going to see any negatives from it, so the in-house or publicly available versions aren’t really the reason for their ability to ‘crow’ about it. Same for the general downtrend of the internet. Their use case fucking sucks, and it isn’t affected.
Do you think the CEO of Kraft feeds macaroni cheese dinner from a box to his kids?
I dont think any of these tech execs (all execs?) use their products. They all have assistants to do everything for them, so they have no idea what this whole “internet” thing is, other than it makes them money.
Oh they know how to get to the porn.
Pretty sure they don’t bother with just photos, I’m sure there’s some guy that’s replaced the one that died in prison.
Pretty sure they don’t bother with just photos, I’m sure there’s some guy that’s replaced the one that
diedwas murdered in prison.FTFY
is this talking about Epstein?
mmhmm.
Once you get above a certain value in your bank account, laws stop applying to you unless you do something catastrophically stupid as to threaten the whole scheme, then you’re hung out as a sacrificial lamb to protect the others.
I guarantee epsteins cartel never died. its headquarters just moved, and the leader changed. thats all.
The only times laws effect rich people are when they screw over other rich people. Elizabeth Holmes didn’t get in trouble for selling incorrect blood tests to patients. She got in trouble for defrauding other rich people.
No, porn is for poor people. These people can (and do) easily afford the live action version.
Thot-on-retainer
Yeah, they just said that their assistants handle everything. Little bit of mood lighting, little bit of a new BMW, little bit of a cover up and hush money. All expensed to the company. Ahh, the good life.
They probably use exclusive paid sites. Maybe even … very exclusive.
they probably use hookers? porn is for the poor people.
1k usd? that is actually cheaper than what i would expect in these circles…
I for sure believe they do. The number of applications that launched with genuinely useful features, only to have them rolled back because of public backlash or shoved behind a paywall, has always pissed me off. Take Bing image search. When it first showed up, you could actually use it for OPSEC and for tracing the origin of suspect memes. If something felt astroturfed or a user seemed like a bot, I could verify it with Bing search. Now I can’t even use it to search a logo because they gutted it. There’s no way I believe that search capability doesn’t still exist behind closed doors, in the hands of political firms, law offices, or government agencies.
No. They’re drinking their own coolaid.
They’ve offloaded what little thinking they did to LLMs (not that LLMs can think, but in this case it makes no difference), and at this point would no longer be able to function if they had to think for themselves.
Don’t think of them as human people with human needs.
They’re mere parasites, all higher functions withered away through lack of use, now more than ever.
They could die and be replaced by their chatbots, and we wouldn’t notice a difference.
I don’t think they are drinking their own cool aid.
Meta’s Zuck and tiktok ceo don’t let their kids on their respective short form content platforms because they know its harmful effects.
They are smart enough to know not to dip into their stash.
I think they definitely have their own version of it.
Nah, you can actually see some of them developing AI psychosis.
You’ve got to understand that most AI execs aren’t technical people, they’re hype men. And LLMs are weirdly good at hype and the illusion of technical correctness. So they don’t have a problem with it.
Sam Altman saying he uses chatgpt to tell him how to act with his baby is one of the things he’s said I actually believe. Of course he’s also a got a team of nannies he couldn’t be bothered to mention, but the trust for chatgpt is there.
That’s not a thing
I’m not sure Google has offloaded all of their thinking to LLMs.
Google still employs very very smart people.
They’d just have to be morally bankrupt human refuse to be contributing actively to the profit-driven destruction of the internet and mass public surveillance like they are, so the rest of your points still stand.
And while a lot of that intelligence may be wasted, it’s more a function of banal evil and corporate bloat than LLMs.
We’re talking execs here, not people.
Of course they’ve got smart people they’re still in the process of getting rid of, but they’re not who the OP was asking about, and they’re mostly irrelevant anyway (and have been since long before LLMs became a problem), since they’re not the ones making decisions.
(Even when talking about smart people, though, being smart about certain things doesn’t mean they’re immune to LLMs. If those things are good at anything it’s catfishing people into believing they’re actually intelligent and useful for something, and many a smart developer or scientist involved in their development has fallen for their stochastic bullshit. And once the brain damage has set in it appears to be quite permanent.)
While I agree that execs are not people, I don’t think they’re being controlled by LLMs.
They’re already idiots for the most part though so what does it matter.
The most horrific part, is that we can’t tell the difference.
Controlled by LLMs or not, their actions would be indistinguishable.
Controlled by LLMs perhaps not, but I believe that the execs pushing AI are drinking as much AI Kool aid as anyone you know who has AI psychosis. That could be why AI is so sycophantic. That is the social model execs in the big 7 want the world to treat them, and they’ve drank so much of their own Kool aid that they believe it now.
They’re obsessed. When there’s manufactured outrage it’ll start out as sensible but quickly evolves into the radicals that spew what you see up top. Ai and chat bots have issues but the push to convince the public to hate it was heavy on lemmy. So now there’s these radicals that are living in their own toxic fantasy.
I started tinkering with ai right around the time ChatGPT rose to prominence. Locally. On my own machine.
I’m not a doctoral level researcher but I mostly get the tech.
I couldn’t agree more. People use ai as a blanket term and don’t understand the difference between an LLM and GAN or any of the dozens of other kinds of models.
If it’s ai it’s bad. Just full stop. Like. The anger of people decrying the death of artistic beauty on subs that prominently feature ms paint stick figure drawings and shitty distorted images makes no sense to me. This isn’t costing anyone’s job. It’s fucking garbage content, with no agenda, and always was.
Having autonomous LLMs posting things is problematic but have ai generated shitposts isn’t.
There is fuck all wrong with using ai to make art to hang on your walls, or funny t shirts, or ridiculous banners, or funny pictures to share with friends. The people that decry the death of art have never bought anything in a gallery, they were fine with artists getting paid fuck all before ai. They weren’t contributing to artists’ living in any meaningful way.
And like. The most vocal critics seem to understand the least about it. Such that they hate it because it’s made with ai just assume that someone’s made it using OpenAI because that’s the only thing their rage-addled minds can process existing.
They say it’s theft and we should ban everything (how’s that working out for you?) instead of clamouring for fair compensation for anyone whose work is being used to train a model.
They’ll yell: all these models are based on theft. And sure. But a) I don’t give a flying fuck about a corporation’a right to exploit an artist and profit off their work and never have. And b) will respond to the suggestion that we create new models that fairly compensate people by yelling louder and becoming irate.
They’re not rational. There are many valid criticisms of the tech, but you can’t even talk to these people about addressing them. Because a lot of the criticisms can and should be addressed. They won’t hear it.
I’ve commissioned paid art for rpg campaigns, and I can’t draw a distinction between AI and LLMs because I get yelled at by people saying, “Its just the name of the field! Nobody thinks the Sims games are actually intelligent!”
So am I allowed to draw that line now? And do you see that me using a comfyui on my local machine does actually mean an artist won’t get paid? This position isn’t 100% strawman.
My main issue is that I think maybe they can’t be patched because they’re not deterministic systems, and I have personally been asked by an executive whether a team could reasonably be replaced by LLM agents behind their backs as soon as the tech was available. How was I supposed to form your opinion given those experiences and why do you think that I’m rage addled rather than just tired?
I don’t really understand what you’re getting at here.
Sure, I’ll line up our talking points with a keyboard and elaborate.
People use ai as a blanket term and don’t understand the difference between an LLM and GAN or any of the dozens of other kinds of models.
When I say “These models aren’t actually intelligent, talk about specific technologies and models without lumping them all together under AI.” I am met with scoffing saying that everyone knows AI is just the name of the field so I should stop being pedantic. Now you’re painting the opposite picture that a person like me lumps them together because of ignorance, and that’s frustrating. Maybe some of those assholes you encountered are exhausted because the artificial cheers for this technology are inescapable and that’s coloring their interactions with you. I don’t feel like it’s a fair point to call people ignorant for having to wade through manipulative marketing language to have a discussion. Hopefully you can sympathize with that a little.
The anger of people decrying the death of artistic beauty on subs that prominently feature ms paint stick figure drawings and shitty distorted images makes no sense to me. This isn’t costing anyone’s job.[…]The people that decry the death of art have never bought anything in a gallery, they were fine with artists getting paid fuck all before ai. They weren’t contributing to artists’ living in any meaningful way.
I’ve paid artists for art related to tabletop RPG campaigns in the past (some but not all). Now everyone shows up to games with genai character portraits and I believe my artist is going to have to quit or at least scale back because of lack of demand. I would ask that we keep in mind how gig work, commission, and subscription models form the basis of most modern artist’s income. Anecdotes aren’t data, but data doesn’t give you an email thanking you for your support while giving up on its dreams. The taste in my mouth just didn’t go away when genai invaded shitposting too. Does that make some sense?
They’re not rational. There are many valid criticisms of the tech, but you can’t even talk to these people about addressing them. Because a lot of the criticisms can and should be addressed. They won’t hear it.
I don’t think the tech is being used well by the largest actors wielding it. I don’t think genai can be secured or patched in the traditional sense because its not deterministic, so prompt diddling will always be a cat and mouse game. I don’t think that hallucinations will ever be meaningfully solved. I’d love to learn that the overall adversarial success rate has lowered from 95% since the study I read last year! It’s not that I won’t hear solutions, I just have very little confidence in them given how this saga has developed over time.
Please spare a little charity for how rattling this shit is to regular people. I believe you that you’ve talked to some absolute dipshits, and I hope you get fewer in the future. I also hope that maybe you can reinterpret some of that vitriol in light of how these systems might have resulted in them being laid off or otherwise maligned. Maybe it’s not that irrational even if they can’t articulate their feelings well. Personally, I’m stifling irritation at an executive who asked me to replace a technical team with an agentic framework (behind their back) despite the technology being wildly inadequate. I hope none of that overflows onto you.
Nah, all the SEO nobheads poisoned search well before Google managed it.
The internet has been inventing nonsense based seemingly on your search queries for a long-ass time.
No, they just have their human assisstants as a filter to use the entshittified search.
another thing to mention, YOUTUBE. The search bar doesn’t even do anything, it shows RECOMMENDATIONS instead of answers to the search.
Paying doesn’t even stop that! It’s actually maddening
How do you use the search bar in youtube? I put in topics or keywords, which seem to work just fine.
Are you putting in whole questions? I’m not sure the search function is designed to worked like that
I saw a cool video here once. Typed the EXACT title to YouTube (including caps in the right words) and it didn’t show up. Only the big channels around that topic.
Personal rant that is still related, but not needed
Hell, I play trackmania turbo. Its still getting new videos from the community. 3-5 vidoes a week. Look it up, and some of the first results are a non-turbo player uploading 1 video 4 years ago. But since that channel is getting millions of videos, THAT video is promoted, not the fans still playing now.
Unlisted videos don’t show up in the search as far as I know.
type in before:2027 at the end of your search for a much more palatable experience
shouldn’t that be before:2025 ?
no,i’ve been using before:2026 up until yesterday. the modifier strips the unrelated suggested content.
I see - I was wondering if it might be something like that. Thank you - I’ll try to think of that - but since I clear my cookies every now and then and do not ever use an account, it might not be quite as needed for me.
I think he meant 2017 and the ingrained year of 2025 led to him typing it slightly wrong.
ah - that makes some sense.
holy shit that’s actually amazing I love you so much
YouTube doesn’t have a search bar. It’s for requesting recommendations on the feed. Search an obscure singer once in your life? For the next 6 months he will be present in your feed.
If you need to do search you have to use newpipe or similar alternatives
Probably controversial but Youtube is my least favourite search because it doesn’t tie in to your Google search at all. Like you search something on Google but YT doesn’t know that so the results are completely different. I WANT it to be fed my normal search history for context, what even is the point of having an interconnected ecosystem and being logged in to Google? Otherwise I’d just stick to DDG
Every example of human interest profile targeting functionality that humanity has ever invented, even if it begins as a way of legitimately improving the user’s experience, eventually is gutted and retooled to cyberstalk and pimp them out to voyeuristic clients.
The clients? Mostly rich pay-per-view incel corporations that could never hope to reach their desired audience organically, much less hold their interest, so they are absolutely willing to pay for non-consentual attention control.
Once we reach this phase, your pimp has less and less interest in delivering on promises they made to you a long time ago about relevant content. They know you’ll keep giving them juicy data to help pair you with clients that they can prove have the best chance at manipulating you and getting what they want from you.
So yes, you’ll probably find that the convenience you could once purchase by giving them more of your data will slow. Ultimately, all it will purchase is more intrusive advertisers stalking you everywhere you go.
Your idea of sticking to DDG sounds like a better option
Even if i put the url for a specific video on my TV YouTube it doesn’t find it.
The LLM? Yes, actually, and it’s not secret:
The “preview” version are often pretty good, before Google deep fries them with sycophantic RHLF. For example, Gemini 2.0 and 2.5 Pro both peaked in temporary experimental versions, before getting worse (and benchmark maxxed) in subsequent updates.
But if you really want unenshittified LLMs, look into open weights models like GLM. They’re useful tools, and locally runnable. They are kind of a “secret useful AI out there that plebs don’t get to use” because of the software finickiness and hardware requirements to run it locally make it difficult.
On top of that, Google employees probably have access to “teacher” models and such that the public never gets to see.
For search? IDK. I’m less familiar on what Google does internally, but honestly, from what I’ve read, the higher ups are drinking kool-aid and assert all is fine.
Actors that are externally awful are ubiquitously internally awful. For example, consider every imperialist/colonial empire that has ever existed.
The problem with conspiracy theories like this is it assumed that the people doing the conspiracy are competent.
Those assholes probably kept a working version of Inbox for themselves. 😡
What did inbox improve on?
I assume all high-level positions in tech companies are using better versions than what they shove out to the rest.
I mean, Microsoft treats Enterprise users with class with Windows 10 Enterprise. That version doesn’t have nearly the amount of bloat that even Professional has. Hell, Enterprise doesn’t even have that stupid online search function.
So it’s like they KNOW they have greenlit some shitty ideas, but, they won’t deal with it so why not just throw it all onto others to make their experiences miserable?
There is Kagi for the rest of us
Yeah this is what I was thinking, they use Kagi or something like it.
I wish they also had an LLM. I need a paid backup for when ChatGPT enshittifies. That won’t eventually extort me like VC backed corpos will
They do offer access to ALL the LLMs. You could pay $20 to OpenAI for only ChatGPT 5, or you could pay $25 to Kagi for unlimited Kagi search and access to premium models for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, and others. If you do annual, I think it’s cheaper.
Are you talking about Lumo or is there another way to access their models?
It’s called Kagi Assistant. You can choose any model. For premium models, you need to upgrade.
Lumo is a proton thing, but they use Mistral models, and you can use those models with Kagi.
…you literally just click the menu and choose the model you want? Or is my UI different than others?
deleted by creator
every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is
You’re correct that there’s a massive flood of bots pushing it everywhere. But regardless of what the subject is, once someone has “bought in” to a scam they tend to stick with it and defend it no matter what. Because the alternative is admitting they were fooled, and that’s basically an uncrossable bridge for most folks.
People on their literal death beds were using their literal last words (before being intubated with covid) to threaten nurses not to go near them with “the jab”. So it really doesn’t surprise me that people continue using “AI” despite it being worse than worthless for literally everything
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan
people continue using “AI” despite it being worse than worthless for literally everything
On the contrary, AI’s been extraordinarily useful for me this year. BUT-- I try my best to understand its ins and outs… i.e., where it’s most accurate, and when it’s most prone to hallucinating confidently incorrect replies.
Pretty much any tool has a narrow range of uses, and is useless for everything else. So it kinda makes sense to me that a ‘do all’ tool would naturally have plenty of flaws in its early stages.
Yeah we’re 3 years past where the scam artists claimed this shit will have already evolved out of its early stages. It ain’t happening.
It takes no effort at all to understand the ins and outs btw. It’s “accurate” for the most abundantly well documented problems you used to solve in half the time by just copy/pasting from stack overflow. The rest of the time it contradicts the advice your mom’s doctor gave her. Sooooo useful wow. But sure shoot your shot, I’d love to hear about how you used it to build a grocery list app or whatever you’re so excited about
Huh, well aren’t you absolutely dripping with cynicism.
Anyway, GPT5.1 and 5.2 have been hugely useful to me across a variety of topics, mainly functioning as a sort of enhanced search engine. For example, loads of searches would take me a lot of time to fully explore the various nuances of that GPT can typically pull together in a coherent way in only seconds.
Probably the most use of all is in helping with my issues that come from learning French, but it’s also helped me with graphics tasks that would have taken me ages in GIMP, helped ID various unknown animals, helped with stats analysis in sports, and easily 2-3 dozen other things I’ve needed help with in the past year.
So you can hang on to your sourpuss attitude all you like, while I reap the growing number of benefits AI has offered me. And no-- that doesn’t mean I love AI or don’t see its very real dangers down the road to human workforces. That stuff I’m indeed very concerned about in the late-stage capitalist reality we live in.
I noticed that Gemini 3, GPT-5.1+, and Claude 4.5 all hallucinate at a level that is equal to sifting through crap on Stack Ovetflow to find a solution that fits.
I’ll take your word for it, as I don’t have that specific experience.
What I’m still exploring is how to get the best out of GPT while working around its limitations. I try to avoid putting it in positions in which it has a chance to hallucinate, and am trying to train it towards a bias towards stating uncertainty where it might not be absolutely sure.
Okay so this time it’s “I like to fuck around with irrelevant sports statistics and I’m really excited to eventually humiliate myself the first time I try my French with a native speaker”
Listen. Thanks for sharing. I genuinely mean that btw I’m aware I’m being abrasive but you’re putting out your perspective in good faith and I appreciate that. That being said I obviously strongly disagree with any of what you’ve listed being a “benefit”, and I especially caution you against considering SlopGPT to be a “nuanced” source of information for your search queries.
There is a difference between believing you have benefitted and actually benefitting. It’s astonishing to me that you would be concerned about the capitalists yet trust them so adamantly in this moment to manage your very relationship with information. Regardless, I hope you have a happy and safe new year. Cheers
…yet trust them so adamantly in this moment to manage your very relationship with information.
That simply isn’t the case, whether or not you choose to believe it, or tot it up on the massive axe you obviously have to grind in these matters. For whatever reasons, you’re choosing to lump me in to a group of people I never belonged to in the first place, which is a -you- problem, and not mine.
And no, GPT is certainly not my primary learning aid upon French. In fact, it’s one of about half a dozen tools I use, which I’m constantly cross-checking against each other for accuracy, forming an overall highly-useful ‘teacher’ of sorts. So when you lead with that pedantic little bit of fluff, what you’re really telling me is that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You seem to see these things in highly binary terms, once again a “you” problem.
Yeah sure, bonne année and cheers, mate.
I’m sorry, you literally openly praised Scam Altman’s product as a massively superior option to web searching yes? Highly nuanced, saves you a ton of time, remember? And your response to the most obvious flaw with this use case is to deny you are affected by the problem in any way and to deflect the topic onto my attitude?
You genuinely remind me of my late uncle who snapped at us every time we told him to quit smoking. He was so convinced it wouldn’t catch up to him, had a hundred justifications. I’ll never forget the way his young daughter cried at the funeral. And before you and your “AI enhanced workflow” get into a whole thing about how cigarettes are different from computer programs, I’m not calling ChatGPT a Marlborough Red, I’m calling you bull headed. I could have just said as much, but as you’ve noticed, I like my fluff.
Anyway, I love how on the one point you addressed, your actual argument shifts from “it’s incredibly beneficial” to “it’s merely an insignificant fraction of my workflow!” Like, notice how your literal first instinct isn’t to defend the usefulness of chatgpt in this instance but to defend the integrity of your French by assuring me you are using legitimate sources as well.
This is the same pattern all AI victims I’ve spoken with have fallen into. It begins with “oh it saves me so much time it’s so useful!” Then as we interrogate how it’s useful to them it turns out all it does is waste their time with a bunch of bullshit they need to verify when they could have just gone directly to the source they use to verify in the first place.
That is if they even bother to verify, btw. But I honestly don’t know which direction is worse. A huge issue is the ones who “verify” are then always completely convinced that they have verified everything correctly. You can imagine the dangers of this mentality
Yeah, that’s probably the case. But hell, the bots are working. They got me second-guessing myself and wondering if I just haven’t seen the “good” AI that the elites are keeping for themselves.
