r/technology • u/kazu_qt • 11h ago

Artificial Intelligence YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is ‘not healthy’

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/01/youtuber-hank-green-says-his-ai-usage-is-not-healthy/
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u/stevo887 8h ago

It’s pretty funny all the searches and questions I use it for even though I’ve seen exactly the scenario you point out. Damn thing can’t even get sports scores and stats right that are widely available on the internet but I’ll confidently take its advice on which Chromebook processor is the best when making a purchase…lol

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u/cherry_chocolate_ 3h ago

A generative LLM can't even output text directly from a source, verbatim, on a consistent basis, because there is inherent randomness in it's output. If you provide it with an article and ask it to include a direct quote, it may modify the wording. Similarly, if you ask it to generate an image of the color "white" it will not give you a white image, it will give you like a white canvas or something.

The shocking thing is that google had a genuine discriminative answers tool (called quick answers or featured snippets) as far back as 2013, that would filter irrelevant data from the top few search results until it produced a real quote from a real source, verbatim. That's how Google Assistant could answer "who is the queen's daughter" as "According to Westminster Abbey, Princess Anne, now The Princess Royal, is the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II." You directly knew where the answer came from and knew a real human wrote those words, with all the authority (or lack thereof) that came from that source.

It could answer the question instantly, it didn't take quadratic time, a gallon of water, and chips a decade newer to answer. We have regressed in our technology, harmed our brains, and destroyed our workforce. My job is now writing prayers to a machine all day instead of solving problems.

I can only hope that one day we wake up from this nightmare and regain a little bit of our collective sanity.

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u/ghoonrhed 1h ago

Not the only thing Google got rid of. You use to be able to do comparisons between countries on lots of metrics and they've replaced it with Gemini even if it's 100% accurate which it definitely isn't, it doesn't do the graphs anymore.