"RE: Trust" was originally published on kevingimbel.de.

RE: Trust

A very good take on putting AI into everything because that’s the big thing right now:

Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.

I am honestly astonished that so many companies don’t seem to realise what they’re destroying.

Jeremy Keith via https://adactio.com/journal/21160

Google putting AI on top of all search results, then having it recommend jumping of the Golden Gate Bridge if you’re depressed1 is peak “we need AI, ship now”-bullshit. I don’t care if they’ll have better AI soon, they’ll be the ones who recommended people to eat stones.

Large Corporations are destroying trust, trust they build over decades.

I use Google to get good, accurate results. To find what I want to find fast and efficiently, and they already destroyed that with a lot of SEO bullshit over the years where one finds the content with the best SEO tags, not the best content.

I use StackOverflow for the community, and because it has good resources and sometimes good discussion. I don’t need any AI to do that, I need good search.

The amount of apps which are really improved with AI is limited, and the fact everybody puts AI into everything these days reminds me A LOT of the big blockchain hype from a few years ago.

WordPress, or better Jetpack, added AI to in some places, for example there’s a function to generate Excerpts based on the content of a blogpost. This is an OK feature, and actually a real world use case. The generated excerpt for this post is:

The post criticizes the overuse of AI in various platforms, particularly Google, for deteriorating trust and replacing quality content with AI-driven results. It compares the current AI hype to past blockchain trends.

This post is a response to https://adactio.com/journal/21160 by Jeremy Keith.

Edits

The first version of this post contained a link to a Mastodon post which suggested Google AI recommends jumping off a bridge when the query “I’m feeling depressed” was entered. That one was fake.

Footnotes

  1. That one was fake, according to https://www.fastcompany.com/91132217/google-ai-overview-errors, still Google AI recommends some questionable things!
    Here’s the OG screenshot https://kevingimbel.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/google-ai-depressed-screenshot.jpeg ↩︎