AI creeping in ...

I hadn't used Google search in a while but I did today on my new computer and lo, instead of a simple list of hits, I got a page redolent of their 'Gemini' AI. So much for picking my own web pages to look at. Might as well go straight to AI.

In another non-Google search about the DIN sensitometry standard I saw a relevant link to a site called "Poe" which turned out be AI-based and, in a table, told me that 21º DIN ~ 200 ISO ... duh

It took two goes for it to show me a properly corrected table. Probably if another person now asks my same question, they would still get "21º DIN ~ 200 ISO" ...

This is not really an AI-bash per se ... I use ChatGPT almost daily ...

Google Gemini and ChatGPT don't know anything. They just search other places for what you are searching for to give you a list. Because they don't know anything, they can't tell if the information they find is correct or not.

I found a simple use for Googles AI search. I wanted to put some basic information text into an Ebook album of a recent photo project.

The subject of the album was Medieval frescoes in Alto Adige. I just asked the question"tell me bout the history and the frescoes in X location". I got a text reply that needed some editing, checking and rearrangement. I also added in some personal comment. It is useful for this sort of thing where the text is basically just copying data from other sources and would take a long time. The text I believe was mostly scraped from a guide put out by the tourist board.

Here is what I produced

But there is no rider or qualifier to that effect.

Even worse, they often get it wrong when other results are correct, but they state definitively as if they are correct and even include some LLM sentences as to why.

I think I have mentioned this before. For example searching a bird or insect image that isn't very distinct, lens will give a list of images / results with what it considers most likely at the top. The ai will grab one of the less likely results and then try and explain why it is correct. Most frustrating - so I often scroll past the so called ai result and use the original search results.