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.

  • Zeth0s@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    11 months ago

    I don’t really understand what it means. If the product is unreliable people won’t use it, and everything will stay as it is now. It’s not a big issue. But It is already pretty reliable for many use cases.

    Realistically the real future problem will be monetization (which is causing the issues of Google), not features

    • Phanatik@kbin.social
      1·
      11 months ago

      Well, here’s the thing. How often are you willing to dismiss the misses because of the hits? Your measure of unreliability is now subject to bias because you’re no longer assessing the bot’s answers objectively.

      • Zeth0s@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        11 months ago

        I don’t expect it to be 100% correct. I have realistic expectations built on experience. Any source isn’t 100% reliable. A friend is 50% reliable, an expert maybe 95. A random web page probably 40… I don’t know.

        I built up my strategies to address uncertainty by applying critical thinking. It is not much different than in the past. By experience, chatgpt 4 is currently more reliable than a random web page that comes in the first page of a Google search. Unless I exactly search for a trustworthy source, such as nhs or guardian.

        The main problem is the drop in quality of search engines. For instance, I often start with chatgpt 4 without plugins to focus my research. Once I understand what I should look for, I use search engines for focused searches on official websites or documentation pages.