Oh nice I hope they end up destroying themselves

That has always been the two big problems with AI. Biases in the training, intentional or not, will always bias the output. And AI is incapable of saying "I do not have suffient training on this subject or reliable sources for it to give you a confident answer". It will always give you its best guess, even if it is completely hallucinating much of the data. The only way to identify the hallucinations if it isn't just saying absurd stuff on the face of it, it to do independent research to verify it, at which point you may as well have just researched it yourself in the first place. AI is a tool, and it can be a very powerful tool with the right training and use cases. For example, I use it at a software engineer to help me parse error codes when googling working or to give me code examples for modules I've never used. There is no small number of times it has been completely wrong, but in my particular use case, that is pretty easy to confirm very quickly. The code either works as expected or it doesn't, and code is always tested before releasing it anyway. In research, it is great at helping you find a relevant source for your research across the internet or in a specific database. It is usually very good at summarizing a source for you to get a quick idea about it before diving into dozens of pages. It CAN be good at helping you write your own papers in a LIMITED capacity, such as cleaning up your writing in your writing to make it clearer, correctly formatting your bibliography (with actual sources you provide or at least verify), etc. But you have to remember that it doesn't "know" anything at all. It isn't sentient, intelligent, thoughtful, or any other personification placed on AI. None of the information it gives you is trustworthy without verification. It can and will fabricate entire studies that do not exist even while attributed to real researcher. It can mix in unreliable information with reliable information becuase there is no difference to it. Put simply, it is not a reliable source of information... ever. Make sure you understand that.

Never had issue with Firefox in my day to day use, sites load fine, uBlock stops all the annoyances and thankfully youtube works well for me.

I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again. Me too. But the vast majority of users need guardrails, and have a different threat model. Even those that also care about privacy, if they just want a solution that comes by default, this adtech 'fake' or 'superficial' solution does provide something. And anything is more than nothing.

It's one of those things where periodically someone gets sanctioned and a few others get scared and stop doing it (or tone it down) for a while. I guess SHEIN are either overdoing it or they crossed the popularity threshold where companies become more scrutinized

I think on iOS they added a thing where it would change based on the days you didn't use Duolingo. Honestly at this point I think it speaks more about the sorry state of their company more than anything.

You’re seriously attempting to argue with me about whether or not transportation existed before cars?

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Gods aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful... In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.