Last week, there were a lot of announcements, but really not that much happened. And for some strange reason, Google didn’t think to use the .io ccTLD for their big annual developer event, Google I/O.
It was so full of AI that they should have called it Google AI. I looked over the announcements, the advertorials on websites announcing stuff that could almost be cool except… well, it didn’t seem that cool. In fact, the web search on Google with AI crutches already has workarounds to bypass the AI – but I have yet to see it in Trinidad and Tobago. Maybe it’s not been fully rolled out, or maybe I don’t use Google as a search engine enough for me to spot it.
No one I saw in the Fediverse was drooling over anything that Google had at the conference. Most comments were about companies slapping AI on anything and making announcements, which it does seem like.
I suppose, too, that we’re all a little bit tired of AI announcements that really don’t say that much. OpenAI, Google, everyone is trying to get mindshare to build inertia, but questions on what they’re feeding learning models, issues with ethics and law… and for most people, knowing that they’ll have a job they can depend on better than they can depend on it today seems more of a pressing issue.
The companies selling generative AI like snake oil to cure all the ills of the world seem disconnected from the ills of the world, and I’ll remember Sundar Pichai said we’d need more lawyers a year ago.
It’s not that generative AI is bad. It’s that it’s really not brought anything good for most people except a new subscription, less job security, and an increase in AI content showing up all over, bogging down even Amazon.com’s book publishing.
They want us to buy more of what they’re selling even as they take what some are selling to train their models to… sell back to us.
Really, all I ever wanted from Google was a good search engine. That sentiment seems to echo across the Fediverse. As it is, they’re not as good a search engine as they used to be – I use Google occasionally. Almost as an accident.
I waited a week for something to write about some of the announcements, and all I read about Google’s stuff was how to work around their search results. That’s telling. They want more subscribers, we want more income to afford the subscriptions. Go figure.