Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

Here is where it really starts to show that this journalist is just lightly paraphrasing a press release. "Links will become an afterthought," will they? What is your evidence for that confident statement about the future?

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

Spot the magical thinking here. No, the "AI" isn't making sense of anything. It's making papier-mache of the input, and preventing the use from doing the sense-making.

Also, is that the Pokemon sense of "evolution"?

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

To expand just a little bit: the point of a Google Alert was to gain access to things that people were saying about a topic that you were tracking, which you otherwise might not turn up. And every (blue, even!) link that you clicked on brought you to a web page you could examine to get a sense of who was writing, in what context, and why.

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

More stenography here. Google starting shoving the "AI Overviews" into query results as an opt-out situation. That is, you have to take action to have them not pop up. I don't doubt they are *shown to* 2.5 billion monthly users, but that doesn't mean they are used by as many or desired by them.

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

The comparsion to ChatGPT in the above screencap also really shows the PR origins of this piece. Google is clearly very very concerned about losing their advantage in this market to OpenAI.

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

NO NO NO NO NO! Flashy polished looking webpages that no one has accountability for run absolutely counter to the common good when it comes to a health information ecosystem AND an informed public.

(Also, "Antigravity"? Yeah, you want us to think this is very cool science fiction and/or magic. Not buying it.)

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

For one final shudder: Pichai here seems to want to think this is helping the world somehow? Gah.

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[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

We don't have to buy this journalist's view of the future as already written by Google. Every time you click through to look at the actual source page you are helping to maintain our information ecosystem and build a better world.

/fin (for now)

[hamishb@mstdn.ca]

@emilymbender And the opt out function has never really functioned.

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@PeterLG Is that not what I just said in the post you are replying to?

[mrmoore@mstdn.social]

@emilymbender Why the f**k do they think we need search results that look more like interactive web pages? Isn't that what the web pages that the search results link to are for?

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@PeterLG Came across as mansplaining.

Pro tip: Agreeing usually starts with "Yes" or something similar that acknowledges the content of the post you are replying to.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@emilymbender i'm fucking weepi ng

Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google

i have never observed google demonstrate any behavior that struck me as evidence of them gathering any form of information

Links will become an afterthought

that reminds me how they own the w3c and use it to ensure no one who has ever created a webpage will ever be able to show it to anyone without exposing them to the most openly broken cryptography i've ever seem

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt.

openly gloating

which will eventually be free

that's right. we will all be free. that's a cryptographic guarantee

[arestelle@dice.camp]

@emilymbender it *is* completely ungrounded

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@arestelle I see what you did there!

[theakashmondal@mstdn.social]

@emilymbender I use #DuckDuckGo

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@hamishb @emilymbender there’s an opt-out function??

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@emilymbender i want you to know your repeated scientific deconstruction of google's ideological warfare under the guise of a search interface has enabled me to extrapolate at great length how the entire formalisms of automata theory have been constructed to exclude any investigation that could ever produce a paper with more than 1% performance improvement over their state of the art. parsing and formal languages has been dead for several decades.

google calls it a "parser confusion vulnerability" when python maintainers use features of the zip file format in their own published releases that make it impossible for specifically google to insert a cryptograpic backdoor onto their users' machines (because google owns pypi), while at the same time the python METADATA file format actively right now supports an "ambiguity' intentionally invisible to human reviewers but instructs the standard packaging software to download and execute code that won't show up in the output.

just as you said:

We revisit foundational work related to information behavior, information seeking, information retrieval, information filtering, and information access to resurface what we know about these fundamental questions and what may be missing.

i very recently realized these questions can be quantified in the field of operating system design, in a really drastic sense that led me to switch my research focus because i'm confident i can convince people every computer should work this way.

just this weekend i realized (quite by mistake) that a fact i'd known since 2019, when google made mozila and twitter lay off their teams of scientists who had just publicly demonstrated that google chrome and bazel products were neither "fast" nor "correct", in ways that are easily and obviously quantifiable, also represented a shocking and obvious failure in the entire theory of operating system design. not just that computers are slow and fail to protect the user, but how demonstrate a thrilling counterexample

which is to say, after an intensive literature review (including "standards" for "portable" behavior that were neither), i'm confident i've identified a novel property for computer security which results from a computer performance property that i could already prove 12 ways from sunday. and i now know how to construct a system that achieves both.

i found a dissertation from the single person who tried something pretty close https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116602585443289491 but otherwise i have performed sufficient literature review to be confident i can express this result in a way that will convince any convince anyone familiar with the field that there's a whole other field they'd been missing this whole time.

and it will run on a computer or phone, to protect people from harm. it demonstrates how the temporal and spatial structure of computer memory in response to user input can be described as a correctness property of the operating system. like i did to google's bazel, it will defeat them in their own terms

thank you

[romli@social.vivaldi.net]

@ShadSterling @hamishb @emilymbender

Yes works for me https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/381948916/how-to-shut-down-and-delete-the-ai-mode-from-google?hl=en

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@romli @hamishb @emilymbender for the AI overview that precedes any actual search results, that link doesn’t describe a persistent opt-out, only a per-search bypass with “ -ai”. Which is a start