Jan Wildeboer 😷May 23

The business model of Tinder etc. isn't to find you the love of your life, it's to keep you on their site, making you pay for as long as possible.

The business model of Big AI isn't to solve your problems with the least amount of tokens. It is to keep you close enough to *think* you might soon have the solution while you keep on spending more and more tokens.

Both (and many other services) make their money based on hope, not on results. That's my opinion.

Show threadBram MoreinisMay 23
@jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW We allow Gemini for search in the school where I work. My AP CS Principles students are ending the year by watching "The AI Doc" and creating presentations and questions for each other. Last class we watched the section of the optimists claiming AI will solve all of our problems. It was utter horseshit, given the material and ecological limits to how much you can build out data centers and robots. 1/3
Show threadBram Moreinis
@jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW So I started using Gemini to find bulletproof resources to make this case. I was shocked to learn that although my prompts clearly indicated the resources I wanted, Gemini's summaries indicating the points being made by the pages pointed to, which were in line with my prompts, led to pages that invariably said the opposite! I might ask, "show me why ice cream is fattening", and the summary would say "ice cream is fattening ", but the cited source ...2/3
May 23 at 1:35pmWeb
Show threadBram MoreinisMay 23
@jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW would have a title like "although people say ice cream is fattening, actually it can remove calories and fat from the body." Has anyone else discovered this manipulative agency in Gemini search summaries misrepresenting sources? It hardly seems accidental. Maybe it only relates to "anti-AI material". 3/3
Show threadDoomsdaysCWMay 23
So, I know with Google AI searches, they change the answers if you ask the question again. I guess the logic is if you don't like the answer it gives you, it goes with a counterpoint? It sounds like Gemini has something similar in its programming. @bmoreinis @jwildeboer
Show threadBram MoreinisMay 23
@DoomsdaysCW @jwildeboer My experience was that the first time I asked "provide evidence that data centers take unsustainable amounts of water from host communities" I would get an article that said "While previously water hogs, data centers are now designed to mitigate the amount of water required by means of internal circulation." Something like that. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact prompt or response but this happened over and over with different material and ecological limit prompts.
Show threadBram MoreinisMay 23
@DoomsdaysCW @jwildeboer But OK, I accept your answer that there is no system gaming, on behalf of the AI itself or its Google masters, promoting resources that counter AI-critical research by citing them as sole links to multi-point Gemini search summaries (where I would have expected many sources). Still, it would be very easy for Google to do that if it wanted to and would not require GAI.
Show threadroboticus lastius (not a bot)May 23
@bmoreinis @jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW
Regardless of Google deliberate intent, if I take this scenario to other players, say if I asked a research librarian or a topic researcher - and they repeatedly replied to my questions about negative impacts of XYZ with inverted answers like "XYZ is actually not bad", I would view that person as deliberately contrary, agenda-driven and unhelpful.
I see no reason to cut AI more slack than I would a human in that role.
Show threadDoomsdaysCWMay 23

Hear hear, @lastrobot ! Well-said! (And I've worked as a reference librarian, so yeah.)

@bmoreinis @jwildeboer

Show threadathena_risingMay 23
@bmoreinis @jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW Putting the costs of this mutated Tetsuo aside, it is not, nor can it ever be in this form, relied on. As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT for a list of ten poems with a certain theme to share with a student. Seven do not exist. I wish they did; they sounded perfect. And that's the issue, AI is not an intelligence. It is a data-driven mimic. They have fed it enough human information, that it picks out patterns in your queries, and responds with what has the highest likelihood of being an answer. Sometimes it's correct, but sometimes it's not. For the seasoned programmer or teacher, that's not ideal, but inaccuracies can be compensated for. For students and the juniors in their careers, this is a disaster.
Show threadBram MoreinisMay 24

@athena_rising @jwildeboer @DoomsdaysCW I just found an article that tells more of the story of how search results (lists of links) are deprecated in favor of AI summaries:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

"Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience, which builds on Google’s earlier launches of AI search features, like its short summaries known as AI Overviews and its conversational search, AI Mode."

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

TechCrunch