this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] HedyL@awful.systems 21 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Most searchers don’t click on anything else if there’s an AI overview — only 8% click on any other search result. It’s 15% if there isn’t an AI summary.

I can't get over that. An oligopolistic company imposes a source on its users that is very likely either hallucinating or plagiarizing or both, and most people seem to eat it up (out of convenience or naiveté, I assume).

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 15 points 20 hours ago

Counter-theory: The now completely irrelevant search results and the idiotic summaries, are a one-two punch combo, that plunges the user in despair, and makes them close the browser out of disgust.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Convenience is king, and never mind accuracy.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

If I'm not mistaken, even in pre-LLM days, Google had some kind of automated summaries which were sometimes wrong. Those bothered me less. The AI hallucinations appear to be on a whole new level of wrong (or is this just my personal belief - are there any statistics about this?).

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 7 points 20 hours ago

Subjectively speaking:

  1. Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
  2. They were more directly lifted from human written sources, I vaguely remember lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by newspapers over google infoboxes and copyright infringement in pre-2019 days, but i couldn't find anything very conclusive with a quick search.
  3. They didn't have the sycophantic—hey look at me I'm a genius—overly-(and wrong)-detailed tone that the current batch has.
[–] lettruthout@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

I usually scroll down just a little and find the source they ~~trained on~~ stole from. That one deserves a click most times because it explains the source.