- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
Some food discoveries have been made by doing what I would call some alarmingly questionable stuff.
I was pretty shocked when I discovered how artificial sweeteners were generally discovered. It frequently involved a laboratory where unknown chemicals accidentally wound up in some researcher’s mouth.
Saccharin
Cyclamate
Aspartame
Acesulfame potassium
Sucralose
Maybe we’ll find that glue pizza works.
Haha, that happens way too often!
I really like reading about accidental discoveries. But the most fun one has to be Silly Putty. 😃
Yeah, chemistry is so fucking complex and unpredictable that most of it happens by accident. Especially for really complex compounds like pharmaceuticals. We basically try a huge number of different things and find out what it does. (Hopefully only good things, a lot of drugs do some good and some bad.)
Those German chemists from the turn of the century were freaking bonkers. They were just synthesiIng random crap and finding all the properties they could. Common practice back then was to taste any compound you synthesized