When the collapse of Stack Overflow happens because of this shit, say goodbye forever to researching solutions to your coding difficulties.
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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It's been a while that I needed to visited Stack Overflow. When I need a coding question answered, I ask Claude Code. Just like back then with answers from Stack Overflow, I still do the sanity checks and verification using my own natural neural network. AI is pretty useful as an assistant for coding if you are able to properly review the generated code.
Stackoverflow he's been collapsing way before the advent of GPTs.
Feel bad because I use this a lot. It really isn't fair for the websites though.
I feel bad for you, though. The error rate on the AI searches is high, and you might go the rest of your life not knowing you were lied to, believing the garbage that showed up on your screen.
In my opinion, the question of quality is paramount. If you want the truth, don't listen to GenAI, because GenAI doesn't actually know anything.
Oh I completely agree. It can come up with some crazy stuff that isn't remotely accurate. I guess I should preface it with, I use it when it isn't anything important lol. Maybe something like "how do I delete X account" or something non critical.
My friend is an electrical engineer at John Deere HQ and he goes nuts with the AI stuff. He has it write basic code in VB, but then he has it compile it then run another request after to fix it when it subsequently doesn't work. I keep telling him he's asking for something bad to happen.
while it's not great, a ton of websites did this to themselves by turning every 1 paragraph piece of information into a 5 page listicle with ads splattered all over the place. I don't think AI search stuff would be nearly as popular if websites didn't make their content impossible to view.
I doubt it, for example Wikipedia is about as clean as it gets for knowledge sites, and their traffic is down significantly. The ai summaries of wiki articles are usually almost the same as the summary at the top of the wiki page, so if people have enough info with the summary, then they're not clicking through.
Shotout to all those "When does season X of Y come out" sites that serve no purpose.
Those aren't the valuable sites, though. They're content/SEO farms whose main purpose is to serve ads to eyeballs for profit. Many of those ads are hosted by Google themselves.
And which tech giant threw up their hands and let those shit-tier websites take over search results... I'll give you one guess.
Baeldung does this and I find them a useful site (with ad blockers).
"But how about I just summarize it for you instead.. poorly and with a few lies added in?"
My wife works at a library. People constantly come in asking to use the library fax machine, because Google's AI says they have one.
They don't have one. Their website says they don't have one. But LLMs have determined it's plausible for libraries to have a fax machine, so Google tells people that they have one.
You'd be surprised at the number of people who can't accept that people working at the library know more about the library than Google.
They should get one! That’s a very normal thing for a library to have.
I've had this experience myself; I'm an American living in the Netherlands and sometimes just don't know the name for the thing I need nor where to buy one. LLM bots are fine for the translation part, but they will make wild assumptions like telling me I can buy a kitchen strainer at the hardware store or food spices at a place called Kruidvat which translates to spice-bucket basically but is actually most like CVS without the pharmacy and does not sell any food besides some candy and chips.
It's hilarious how quickly these bots can swing from super useful to actually harmful to trust.
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Also very lengthy all the time. It can't really summarise without rambling. It's in no way succinct and too chatty. Verbose, you might say. Garrulous even. Loquacious, if you prefer. Needs to pipe down. Can't rein it in. Doesn't shut the fuck up.
Let's dig into that.
That’s the biggest problem in my opinion. They are scary good at generating text. But there’s effectively no filter, it’s just an endless stream of vaguely plausible text, true or false. And unfortunately, humans are prone to think “wow that’s a lot of text, they must’ve done their research and put in tons of effort!” because historically that was for the most part true.
For example: all those guys who say “AI made me 10x more productive” are almost certainly measuring it by lines of code. As we all know, more code is almost inevitably an unmaintainable buggy mess.
That’s the biggest problem in my opinion.
no, the biggest problem is they are stealing someone else's work and making money with it, depriving the original author reward for their work.
Even bigger than that is the environmental impact the stupid data centers for LLMs do.
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Google has already patented a method to use AI to fully rewrite and redesign your website if its algorithms decide it's not engaging enough.
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website - https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/03/06/google-just-patented-the-end-of-your-website/
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It’s crazy to me how far we’ve gotten away from sanity. How long until Google starts fucking with summaries and inserting corporate opinions because a website contains content capitalism doesn’t align with? Like a website about anti-Zionism for example.
I'd be surprised if this isn't already happening or at the very least being tested on a smaller scale.
Oh yeah, it is definitely heavily biased already. Just google anything controversial and you'll see it to some degree.
"Is ICE doing illegal operations" -> "Allegations..." Anything about the strait of hormuz -> straight up no summary whatsoever lmao
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How long? Brother, controlling the narrative is the entire point of why AIs are being shoved down your throat
Wow the masses with their Mechanical Turk, then pull the strings behind the scenes whenever you need to tip the scale in your favor. Drive engagement with your product? Sus out new innovations that could threaten your business model? Manufacture consent for your international apartheid resource extraction project? Stifle populist grassroots political movements at home?
You already know it’s true because you laugh about Grok every time it truth-dunks on Elon. We’re all collectively like “wow he can’t even control it enough to share his warped PR version of reality” which means we fucking know why these things exist: to gaslight the human race to the will of the capitalist ruling class
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And the next generation of AI gets trained on the AI summaries so it loses all contact with reality.
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Just inside that door is a Home Alone level of ad boobytraps you have to endure before the shop owner smashes you in the shins with an email newsletter appeal. Only then can you actually shop for a bit before a pop-up ad spider falls on you from the rafters.
"Hi we noticed you're running an adblocker. You'll have to turn that off to see our site"
I call that one the ol' go fuck yourself.
The "This isn't a ad-blocker complaint / paywall, but you have to sign up to continue" ones are somehow even worse to me.
Yes, but surely Google's plan long term is to be the one placing those ad booby traps and taking the money from that shopkeep, but obviously not in an evil way, that'd be weird.
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How about I summarise it? That way you don't have to deal with a cookie popup, a news letter popup, a signin with google popup, a request to send notifications to your browser popup, a back button that doesnt take you back to your previous page, and ads between every other paragraph.
Browsing the modern internet without uBlock origin and maybe a cookie consent blocker is truly a horrible experience.
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This, and newspaper writing style which endlessly beats around the bush, actually are the reasons for the mainstream accepting AI summaries. AI summaries only work because the Internet is a hellscape of intentionally bad UX with site-owners being hostile towards their users.
Real newspaper writing style doesn't beat around the bush.
SEO-optimization writing style does beat around the bush, because they have to try to "organically" mention all the keywords that might bring someone to the page. They also need to make it longer so there are more places to insert ads.
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Worst is when is uses phrases like “widely accepted” for questions I ask that are open-ended. Also Gemini completely makes up stuff when it comes to configuring settings in DAW and Davinci Resolve in my experience.
Hell, even before the AI summsary, the "at a glance" short blurb shown of the page on a Google search generally had enough of the information I was looking for that I almost never had to click into the whole page.
The AI summary conflating contradictory info into a single cohesive looking response makes it more likely that I will view the cited source to see what it actually said vs what the shittastic Gemini agent cobbled together.
~~Summarize it for you~~ Summarize it for you incorrectly.
There. Fixed it.
Also, not to toot my own horn here, but I made a video this week about alternatives to google search if anyone's interested.
The number of times I've seen AI overviews directly contradict the source material...
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It’s sadly been like that since before they implemented AI
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