It feels to me like this has been a risk for a long time. The online ad business feels like a fake that advertisers are simply taking a long time to recognise as such. It seems quite possible to me that the looming reality of a Dead Internet has set off (even more) alarm bells at Google.

That is the extreme opposite of what has happened in my circles over the last few months. Everybody has used it enough now - and, crucially has had to revisit stuff they did with LLMs - to know how little is behind the hype.

If I felt more petty, I'd be riding the I Told You So train a lot right now.

Have you used their software lately? All they became more efficient at is further destroying the little code quality their products had left.

I see this less as people willingly referring to LLMs for that kind of information, and more as simply an obvious side effect of shiving it in people's faces everywhere.

Most of us here are techies, we know what the "AI overview" is and what that implies about its factuality and reliability. Although I sometimes fall into the trap of reading it myself, absent-mindedly, because it's so front and center on any browser not specifically configured to get rid of it. Most people just Google something and look what turns up. That used to be an okay approach, too, before companies decided that LLM slop should push out references to actually worthy sources.

I put 99% of the blame for this on Google & Co. and laugh in the face of their promises to "improve accuracy". No, they're not going to turn a glorified Markov chain generator into something that somehow starts being an adequate replacement for authoritative sources. They didn't understand the problem, and apparently they don't understand the basics of their own technology.

Yeah, the irony wasn't lost on me either xD

They took great care to prevent the sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands... *after having migrated it to freaking Azure*! The one public cloud where we can be most certain that it has already been entirely and lastingly compromised.

"This has sent shockwaves across developer circles."

Yeah... no, it didn't. No actual developer uses shit like this, or doesn't know how to protect their systems from the behaviour of inherently erratic tools.

Lax development standards in an overvalued tech-bro company? Say it ain't so! Vibe coders getting owned because they don't check LLM slop output, which they wouldn't have the knowledge to understand even if they did? Colour me purple!

Everything about this is about as surprising as thunder after lightning.

You even have the obligatory corporate statement about how the thing the company has just been shown to not care about in the least, is actually their top priority. This entire article could be a satire.

You can click the feedback button below the answer and presumably send your correction to Google's /dev/null

Yeah, especially considering how many potential sources for errors there are for LLM responses in these examples.

An LLM would be very susceptible to giving you the starting time of some previous match the same teams played. And not pick up a scheduling time in time. Why go for anything less than the official source?

And different meats need different treatment to be safe - another thing an LLM can very easily get mixed up. I'd never take such information from any source lesser than one written by a named, knowledgable person. Or on a reasonably popular site with a discussion features where people could ask whether they're out of their mind, if the info is incorrect.

Wow, tried to use two minus signs instead of an en dash to circumvent /.'s Unicode derangement, but my auto-correct seems to have turned it into something even worse...

I have to wonder, though â€"â€" if it's not important whether you get a correct answer, why do a search at all? Couldn't you just come up with your own best guess and be fine with that?

I don't buy the story that the music industry is scared. As you mention, Spotify *is* the music industry. They control the conduit. There wasn't exactly a shortage of real music on existing catalogues before. They still managed to fuck over real artists, first by not paying them, then by replacing them with cheaply purchased library music wherever they could get away with it. They have no reason to be afraid. Non-industry people threatening their grift with GenAI slop? They have the means to produce a million times as much slop, and the power to make the non-industry slop disappear. The industry loves GenAI because it is just the next tool with which they can get closer to their vision of killing human creativity forever, replace it with their own zombie versions of it, and never pay anyone for anything ever again.

And exactly what do you think the point is of listening to music? Who sits down to listen to a GenAI album? Literally, what's the point? If there is no human behind it, no artistic intent, nobody expressing anything, why would I want to waste even one second of my lifetime listening to it? Do you think music is purely functional?

Except that authenticity really does matter. I have as much interest in listening to GenAI slop music as I do in reading made-up GenAI "news" stories. That I initially found it an interesting story doesn't change the fact that I'll deem it a garbage waste of time if I only later find out that it was all fake.

The problem is that people *don't* want to listen to it. The fact that they sometimes don't know what it is without being told, doesn't really factor into it.

I don't want to eat beef jacked up on hormones and antibiotics, even if my taste buds can't tell the difference. Declarations for informed decisions matter.

The Canadian one was meant to be CKUT.