The British entrepreneur says search results are plagued with ‘clickbait’

Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”

He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.

Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.

    • dependencyInjection@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      61·
      11 months ago

      It depends what you’re using it for as to whether you need to fact check stuff.

      I’m a software developer and if I can’t remember how to do an inner join in SQL then I can easier ask ChatGPT to do it for me and I will know if it is right or not as this is my field of expertise.

      If I’m asking it how to perform open heart surgery on my cat, then sure I’m probably going to want several second opinions as that is not my area of expertise.

      When using a calculator do you use two different calculators to check that the first one isn’t lying?

      Also, you made a massive assumption that the stuff OP was using it for was something that warranted fact checking.

      I can see why you would use it. Why would I want to search Google for inner joins sql when it is going to give me so many false links that don’t give me the info in need in a concise manner.

      Even time wasting searches have just been ruined. Example: Top Minecraft Java seeds 1.20. Will give me pages littered with ads or the awful page 1-10 that you must click through.

      Many websites are literally unusable at this point and I use ad blockers and things like consent-o-matic. But there are still pop up ads, sub to our newsletter, scam ads etc. so much so that I’ll just leave the site and forego learning the new thing I wanted to learn.

    • Zeth0s@lemmy.worldEnglish
      611·
      11 months ago

      It’s pretty trivial to fact check an answer… You should start using this kind of bots more. Check perplexity.ai for a free version.

      Sources are referenced and linked.

      Don’t judge on chatgpt free version

      • GigglyBobble@kbin.social
        11·
        11 months ago

        It’s pretty trivial to fact check an answer

        People don’t do it though and often parrot bullshit.

        • Zeth0s@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          11 months ago

          People who do so aren’t smart enough to use internet anyway. With or without AI it wouldn’t change anything for them, they stay stupid and will continue acting stupidly

      • madnificent@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        11 months ago

        Perplexity.ai has been my go to for this reason.

        It often brings up bad solutions to a problem and checking the sources it references shows it regulary misses the gist of these sources.

        There sources it selects are often not the ones I end up using. They are starting point, but not the best starting point.

        What it is good for is for finding content when I don’t know the terminology of the domain. It is a starting point ready to lead me astray with exquisitely written content.

        Find trustworthy sources and use them.

        • Zeth0s@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          11 months ago

          It is more of a proof of concept at the moment, but it shows the potential