Google’s actions have also led to protests against the company, with demonstrators chanting the catchy slogan, “Hey Google, nice try. We don’t want your Gemini…”
Chalkbeat Chicago reports that it led to protests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Chicago, where the city’s school district recently blocked student access to generative AI tools such as Gemini.
The spokesperson added that if CPS cannot provide students access to Google’s search engine without its AI feature, the district will “look to other search solutions.”
Personally, I never had major issues with Google, to be frank, and their DevTools of Chromium is the best general web-dev tools still, I know for desktop.
Since the “AI Overviews”, I’ve been having extensions and udm14 to not even see those, preferring actual web pages with people and normally authentic effort to bookmark, and learn from.
For Android? Firefox, sure, since it supports extensions, and is actually open-source if compared to the Google’s official Chromium based.
Yet, while I do not reside in USA, the article’s main message is much heartfelt appreciated…
Thank you… thank you heartfelt dear tutors, teachers, professors… people… for the thoughtful, accountable, humane… attitude for our, the humanity’s future… where we must not atrophy… but develop, create, preserve and respect our infinitely magnificent history… for the better, responsible, and safe marvelous future… to be proud of.
As a high school librarian, I agree with CPS here. Google’s AI “search results” have imposed a new layer of difficulty in teaching research and critical thinking skills, while adding no benefit to those processes. I have several students who think LLM output must be accurate because it comes from an LLM, or that AI search summaries are a reliable source on their own - no need to click the included links to see if AI matches. The quality of student work suffers. I too would rather no Google than mandatory AI search.
Thank you… thank you heartfelt for the marvel… miracles you do…
And for the mature view on it…Those students/people who believe AI is accurate should consider the actual algorithm and how works under the hood.
One of the main idea behind is the feedback system, and if any wrong bit comes from the feedback, it’ll affect the whole set, and 0 may become 1, eventually.
Another issue is the following:
These conditions are ripe for “copyright laundering”-the use of multi-generational synthetic pipelines, an “AI Ouroboros,” to render traditional proof of infringement impracticable.
This Article adapts the “fruit of the poisonous tree” (FOPT) principle to propose a novel AI FOPT standard: if a foundational AI model’s training is adjudged infringing (either for unlawful sourcing or for non-transformative ingestion that fails fair-use), then subsequent AI models principally derived from the foundational model’s outputs or distilled weights carry a rebuttable presumption of taint.
The burden then shifts to the downstream developers-those who control the evidence of provenance-to restore the evidentiary bargain by affirmatively demonstrating a verifiably independent and lawfully sourced lineage or a curative rebuild, without displacing fair-use analysis at the initial ingestion stage. Absent such proof, commercial deployment of tainted models and their outputs is actionable.
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02631 (Copyright Laundering Through the AI Ouroboros…)
Another issue is the dear dependence on vendors who control and supersize your use while you are subscribed, and while you regularly atrophy and become more and more dependent on some vendor, you pay more and more, realize and memorize less and less…
To the point you socialize less, your write less with your own hands, mind, and attitude, you create less, you live less…
google results are just ai summary and ads, they are not the undisputed best search engine as the were 20 years ago, plenty of decent choices nowadays
I’d say the only halfway decent choice is NoAI DDG, which is mostly just a bing proxy. StartPage was my goto for a long time but they implemented a proof of work captcha that adds like a whole minute of wait to my searches so. i gave up on them.
SearXNG is the greatest, it works way better than Google, it’s free and open source, and you can self-host your own instance for extra privacy if you want.
No, plenty of shit choices. Decent choices are limited and still shit.
Glad to see this. Hope Google falls from grace. They have been making their products and services worse over the years and only pander to share holders not customers.
The old maxim applies: if you aren’t paying for the service you aren’t the customer, you’re the product being sold.
Agreed! But for them, even when you pay, say for data storage space, you still don’t get any preferential treatment. All of their customer service is AI now. Their real customers are the companies they serve up ads for. I haven’t used Google in years, and avoid them like the plague. I also block them on my network.
Damn, this makes me imagine an alternate world where google used ai to destroy their search monopoly and blew up the online advertising bubble
