Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.

We have batteries. But yeah, attacking the grid might be smart.

At least the AI doesn't mean to lie to you, unlike the intention of the rest of the site.

If you are taking business advice from ChatGPT that includes purchasing a ChatGPT subscription or can’t be bothered to look up how it works beforehand then your business is probably going to fail.

AFAIK, you have the option to enable ads on your lock screen. It's not something that's forced upon you. Last time I took a look at the functionality, they "paid" you for the ads and you got to choose which charity to support with the money.

Amazon is an absolute scumbag company, they don't pay taxes and they shit all over their workers, and fight unions tooth and nail. I have no idea how people can buy at Amazon, that stands for everything Trump and Musk stands for. Just fucking stop using Amazon if you value democracy. Pay an extra dollar and buy somewhere else.

When a Lemmy instance owner gets a legal request from a foreign countries government to take down content, after they’re done shitting themselves they’ll take the content down or they’ll have to implement a country wide block on that country, along with not allowing any citizens of that country to use their instance no matter where they are located. Block me, I don’t care. You’re just proving that you can’t handle the truth and being challenged with it.

The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads. If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.