There isn't really any profit in going endlessly over just how badly megacorporations have stewarded the web. It's not worthwhile as a hobby! And if they didn't exceed themselves at literally every turn, I wouldn't be forced to do so. This isn't a matter of someone being wrong on the Internet, although that certainly does occur. This is more about someone making the internet wrong.
I was just talking about the grim barbershop choir that makes up the adherents of a very particular kind of Apocalypse Cult. They don't think of it that way, no. They're cool hyper-rational folks whose belief system has no emotional substrate at all. They just think that whatever the powerful want to do is what should occur because it will occur. For me, that's insufficient as an operating principle. It disincentives labor when everything people create online is being stolen 24/7 and the people we hire every couple years to do shit don't do shit. That strikes me as quite obvious.
So, in the latest version of this, Google's haruspex skein of internal metrics and also their unmitigated horror at a web that isn't in their direct control has lead to a very novel conclusion: that they shouldn't merely be the Argonath of the Internet, which they have been for aeons as the Internet recognizes time, but the Internet entire - letting their imps and daemons read all of it, intercepting then and answering queries themselves before some cur or ne'er-do-well has the chance to. It's called AI Overviews, and it often has bizarre answers to things because their training data hasn't been labeled correctly. And also because "AI" doesn't actually know what anything is. I was surprised to learn that AI is quite bad at math, alas! And, one presumes, alack.
Some of the things going around as memes online are due to edits, as is typical. But the "answers" it often gives are fucked up enough that they gotta go in by hand and fix them. We have another explanation - it's at least as good as the real one, and considerably less expensive to operate. A couple bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and you're basically paid up.
(CW)TB out.
