My opinion on AI search engines is kinda turning around.

My opinion on them hasn't changed because they return inaccurate or irrelevant info more often than not, and thus aren't just useless, they're actively harmful.

I mean you cant just trust the AI answers but they are undeniably very good for how new they are. In a few years you probably will be able to just trust them as much as any other source on the internet.

But that's the problem - they're pulling their info from other sources on the Internet. Which means, in order to verify the AI, you have to check the sources. But at that point you might as well skip the AI entirely and go straight to the sources.

Like it was just making shit up.

they return inaccurate or irrelevant info more often than not

No they dont. They do occasionally return garbage but it's definitely not "more often than not" in my experience. I think it's just cool to hate AI now more than anything

There's that now infamous case of the lawyer getting in deep shit (disbarred, I think) for using AI to do his case, and it cited past cases that straight-up don't exist.

None of this is supposed to be profitable for 10 years, and it's a tech bubble that's guaranteed to burst

No they dont. They do occasionally return garbage but it's definitely not "more often than not" in my experience.

Defenders will say something like "it's just another tool" but we've seen enough throughout history to know that none of these productivity benefits will be passed on to the worker

Any artificial intelligence built from human intelligence is 100% guaranteed to have flaws. We can't even properly utilize the intelligence we've been given.

You may be right that the productivity won't be passed onto to the worker but that is a separate issue and also not the fault of the tools themselves.

Either way, you could say the same thing for simply googling something. The info can be good or bad. You still have to have some knowledge and exhibit some critical thinking

You absolutely can, which means AI yields no actual benefit over just doing a regular search.

It's much quicker. Thats the benefit. There's been a ton of times where the ai summary has saved me a few minutes of perusing the results

It is, however, the fault of the people pushing those tools. Giving them a hard time is 100% fair game.

It's often enough that they should never be trusted without further verification. When that further verification consists of looking at other search results and evaluating them, it makes the AI results pointless.

Yeah, if something is demonstrably incorrect or unreliable even 20-30% of the time, then it cannot and should not be trusted entirely any percent of the time.

"Your Honor, I'd like to cite the precedent set by Wright vs Von Karma (2001)."

I have to say searching for Is this player good or Is this team good and getting an instant answer is really helpful. The question is subjective anyway so you dont really have to worry about misinformation

If you're asking a question for which the accuracy of the answer doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that you get an answer at all.

There are certain questions for which you dont need to go deep diving to confirm that an answer is true or false. You can also use your previous knowledge to have an idea of whether the answer is in the ballpark or not.

That's the thing, though: If you accept whatever answer you find that seems correct enough based on what you know, you're no more likely to have the correct answer than if you just made up an answer that seems correct enough based on what you know. If being right matters, that's a bad thing either way. If being right doesn't matter, then why waste time putting in the effort to find somebody else's answer that seems correct instead of just inferring a plausible conclusion yourself?

Would love to see the judge Google that.

My opinion on them hasn't changed because they return inaccurate or irrelevant info more often than not, and thus aren't just useless, they're actively harmful.

That being said, the real problem is that search engines as a whole have have degraded so much over the last 10-15 years or so that you're going to have a hard time finding what you're looking for no matter how you look for it.

It's okay, the judge will just use the AI look-up to see what it was, and be told it was a real case that set a real precedent, and the cycle will continue.

I actually had a conversation yesterday with someone who was taking AI answers as fact. They are a helpful starting point but when someone does this its annoying af