Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
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I really do believe people have a moral obligation to not expose themselves to GenAI outputs. We built a machine for making sentencelike blobs that look convincing but are peppered with lies. That is brain poison! Why assume you can soak your brain in poison without consequences?
Like, if you're here, you left Twitter/"X", right? Would you tolerate it if the whole time you were talking to your friends, fascist propaganda were being inserted in the margins? So why tolerate the Gemini banner?
@mcc i do not want to expose myself to GenAI output, but the people who pay my wages unfortunately tell me i have to do it, and i cannot tell them to go fuck themselves because i like living in a house.
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@mcc we're not sure how we feel about there being a moral obligation to not look, but we have been avoiding looking on practical grounds.... if it turns out the entire world melts their brains and the only way we can be happy is to do the same, we can always melt ours later
@mcc that's unusually elitist framing of us and we acknowledge that. we don't mean it as a superiority thing, it's just, ughhhhhhhhh, we practice enough self-awareness stuff that we can legit feel it weakening our conceptual understanding of any topic we accidentally read its output about ><
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@mcc that's unusually elitist framing of us and we acknowledge that. we don't mean it as a superiority thing, it's just, ughhhhhhhhh, we practice enough self-awareness stuff that we can legit feel it weakening our conceptual understanding of any topic we accidentally read its output about ><
@mcc you know how good technical writing involves the author picking which concepts they're going to convey, taking a stance on what those concepts mean in this context, drawing clear lines, presenting the material in a clear order and all that?
generated text from these models does the opposite of all those things, it turns even simple obvious ideas into something vague and confusing by using them in conflicting ways within the same piece
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@mcc we're not sure how we feel about there being a moral obligation to not look, but we have been avoiding looking on practical grounds.... if it turns out the entire world melts their brains and the only way we can be happy is to do the same, we can always melt ours later
Totally agree. Everybody thinks they personally are immune (just as so many people on Xitter or watching Fox News think they're immune to the cognitive impact of continually floating in the sea propaganda and disinfo) ... but I was really struck by the comment from a researcher in the study about AI autocorrect suggestions swaying people's attitudes:
"In every experiment, the researchers found that participants’ views shifted in the direction of the AI bias. The biggest surprise, Naaman said, was that mitigation measures did not work.
“We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”"
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I really do believe people have a moral obligation to not expose themselves to GenAI outputs. We built a machine for making sentencelike blobs that look convincing but are peppered with lies. That is brain poison! Why assume you can soak your brain in poison without consequences?
Like, if you're here, you left Twitter/"X", right? Would you tolerate it if the whole time you were talking to your friends, fascist propaganda were being inserted in the margins? So why tolerate the Gemini banner?
(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)
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Totally agree. Everybody thinks they personally are immune (just as so many people on Xitter or watching Fox News think they're immune to the cognitive impact of continually floating in the sea propaganda and disinfo) ... but I was really struck by the comment from a researcher in the study about AI autocorrect suggestions swaying people's attitudes:
"In every experiment, the researchers found that participants’ views shifted in the direction of the AI bias. The biggest surprise, Naaman said, was that mitigation measures did not work.
“We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”"
@jdp23 @mcc @ireneista IIRC this is in line with findings on misinformation in general, that you don't generally remember where you learned a thing, and it is easier to accept than reject claims, so just being exposed to misinformation makes one more inclined to inadvertently internalize it
edit:
- this Vox article summarizes and links to several studies
- more explanations (and examples) in this article at The Conversation
- this Conversation article notes that "the fine details needed to debunk a myth are generally more complicated than the myth itself" and therefore harder to remember
- see e. g. this 2009 paper arguing, basically, that easier-to-remember things are perceived as truer; this 2019 study on inducing false memories about Ireland's 2018 abortion referendum; or this 2024 study on repetition and climate-skeptic claims
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc "noai" dot ddg.com bothers me. it means they are natively doing ai except for weirdos.
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(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)
@mcc this is exactly what i tell ppl about switching from mac to windows, and then windows to linux as well
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@mcc "noai" dot ddg.com bothers me. it means they are natively doing ai except for weirdos.
@f4grx yes, and the noai landing page covered in "NO AI" banners is more than a little cringe. however, this is better than Kagi where the company is actively trumpeting AI supremacy and begrudgingly allowing you a back door to hide the AI.
i'd be so much more willing to recommend kagi if only they would only give you the option of paying for a plan with zero AI tokens.
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc
when it comes to the FOSS engines I prefer @marginalia over SearXNG
the latter has more results but tends to serve unrelated garbage (image search is fine): while the former's bias towards smaller sites comes in handy.
never had an excuse to try Kagi because Startpage has served my urge for "google without AI summaries" well enough. -
@f4grx yes, and the noai landing page covered in "NO AI" banners is more than a little cringe. however, this is better than Kagi where the company is actively trumpeting AI supremacy and begrudgingly allowing you a back door to hide the AI.
i'd be so much more willing to recommend kagi if only they would only give you the option of paying for a plan with zero AI tokens.
@mcc I agree. Even if they advertise duck.ai on the same page.
Kagi is an entire no-go with the conditions described here https://www.osnews.com/story/139270/do-not-use-kagi/
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@jdp23 @mcc @ireneista IIRC this is in line with findings on misinformation in general, that you don't generally remember where you learned a thing, and it is easier to accept than reject claims, so just being exposed to misinformation makes one more inclined to inadvertently internalize it
edit:
- this Vox article summarizes and links to several studies
- more explanations (and examples) in this article at The Conversation
- this Conversation article notes that "the fine details needed to debunk a myth are generally more complicated than the myth itself" and therefore harder to remember
- see e. g. this 2009 paper arguing, basically, that easier-to-remember things are perceived as truer; this 2019 study on inducing false memories about Ireland's 2018 abortion referendum; or this 2024 study on repetition and climate-skeptic claims
@nev @jdp23 @mcc @ireneista in behavioral economics, it's known as an anchor point:
Amos Tversky; Daniel Kahneman Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/tversky-kahneman-science-1974.pdf -
@mcc I agree. Even if they advertise duck.ai on the same page.
Kagi is an entire no-go with the conditions described here https://www.osnews.com/story/139270/do-not-use-kagi/
@f4grx What do you think of Startpage?
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@f4grx What do you think of Startpage?
@mcc I have been using startpage as my daily driver for years now. I have nothing to complain up to now.
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(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)
@mcc it's kinda eerie how much this also sounds like real life situations people face when they can see the coming change in their country, obviously it's not as easy to just "leave" (especially nowadays) but like these were and are decisions people have had to face and being told to wait and see, but then you have to flee in a rush if it does get worse
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@mcc I have been using startpage as my daily driver for years now. I have nothing to complain up to now.
@mcc OK I see they also have their vanish private AI lol. Never saw that before I just found it in the lateral menu I never use. at least they dont insert ai previews in normal searches. I block their ads with ublock origin.
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@mcc I will say it isn't as good as Google, but I've been using startpage as my search engine, because it doesn't bother me to do AI stuff and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any AI stuff (yet)- I was on another small search engine (Qwant) for a while until it started adding AI features.
Weirdly enough the best results I get are from lycos, but it only actually will do a search about half the time...
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@luxliquida @mcc Dammit, that took less time then I expected.
I guess I'll go back to using Google with the no AI parameter added when it finally gives up the ghost or starts pushing AI at me. at least until that stops working.
Edit: I was literally responding to this while my work computer installed updates and restarted, and when it booted back up, it installed a waterfox update with this in the changelog for that update
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@luxliquida @mcc Dammit, that took less time then I expected.
I guess I'll go back to using Google with the no AI parameter added when it finally gives up the ghost or starts pushing AI at me. at least until that stops working.
Edit: I was literally responding to this while my work computer installed updates and restarted, and when it booted back up, it installed a waterfox update with this in the changelog for that update
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@luxliquida @Canageek i went onto their feedback forum and asked for this and wound up in a heated personal argument with the CEO, who although i was coming in as a paying customer was invested in saying i should not want the thing i want. it was a deeply weird and unpleasant experience.
