alt Hacker NewsMy non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
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That difference can be pretty small when most of the web is also consumed by low effort automatically generated slop. You can't escape it. I know there is a good web out there, but the search engines refuse to give it to me. Probably their algorithm. preferring recent content over good content.
I suspect the only real answer is an economic one, Something like Kagi, where hopefully by paying for results you change from being the product to a customer and this is incentive enough for them to provide good results.
Yeah. AI slop is lying to people. When I realised that I disabled it. Thankfully there are browser extensions that do that easily.
People call it hallucinating. I think it is lying. Google etc.. became a huge liar. All those AI slop companies are lying to the people now.
Google only cares when something gains traction (and thus potentially hurts its bottom line". For example, it was answering "How many p's in Google" with "There are two p's in Google"[1] for long enough for me to get non-technical family members making a joke out of it. Google fixed it, only for it then to briefly tell you there were no p's in 'Alphabet' either.
Those particular bits on nonsense seem to have been stopped for now, but let's not fall prey to Gell-Mann amnesia. The only problem Google has fixed is "our LLM was hurting our reputation in this specific case". They have not, and likely cannot, fix the underlying problem.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/why-googles-ai-cant-spell-...