Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
bakugo · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
ButlerianJihad · · focus · HN ↗
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.