“Oh look at this guy reading a BOOK at the cafe, he must think he’s sooooo cool! I get he thinks a woman will sleep with him cuz he’s so smart and cultured.”
Or maybe my roommate is having their partner over and they kicked me out and I’d rather do this than just be on my fucking phone for two hours?
in extremely mild defense, google has been garbage for a decade because of SEO and advertising, but i do wonder why the impulse is to LLM instead of wikipedia for looking up somebody with a published book
Google’s goal now is to keep people at a google. Ideally for them - you won’t click away. For example - their Youtube embeds aren’t right-clickable. If you want to open them in a new tab - you have to click twice. First click to make the vid an interstitial. And then you can right-click the Youtube link overlay on the vid.
And there’s “top of the page” syndrome. People assume that the best stuff is at the top of the page so why keep scrolling? When people go to a news site - their main focus is the top of the page. The same is true for google. And google puts its AI slop embed at the very top of the page. Plus the drop downs answers are likely (very likely?) AI answers too.
Also some people (many people?) have decided an AI slop is good enough. Google has caused Wikipedia’s traffic to drop.