All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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It's like getting the info from some rando at some party. It's to be lightly penciled in.
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AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It's absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It's like we're collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful
If it didn't do the AInsearch repeatedly they couldn't use the billions of daily searches to artificially boost their AI engagement metrics and further inflate this bubble.
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May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.
They even have a direct URL for it if you don't want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
They also give you the option to (do their best at) blocking AI-generated search results. (Not perfect, of course, but it does a decent job of reducing how much AI slop you get in your search results.)
Better yet:
and you can add it as a custom search for firefox/waterfox as:
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Or Qwant. It's Euroopan and doesn't even have the AI option.
Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears' quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an "illegal handoff", which I had never seen before.
I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like "Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!"
I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can't do that.
AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.
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But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026... (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
Fucking hell, lol
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
noai.duckduckgo.com
The funniest part is I've gotten better answers from duckeuckgo and Bing's AI back in the day because they both didn't treat reddit as a reputable source of info lmao.
Dunno how the scene is now, but I wouldn't be surprised if its the same.
Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.
That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.
LLMs fundamentally can't learn. They will continue to fail the same thing over and over until they guess and check into a response that appears coherent and correct.
AI has never been 100% accurate to the documents it pretends to reference, so the fact that anybody could even consider reading it like it's not pure gibberish is mind boggling to me.
I gave Claude a document to proofread today. It came back with an error. Clause said I used "told" instead of "tell." The error ended up being Claude's error, as I used "tell," and it was just confused.
This was the first time I ever used Claude. Just wanted to see what it was like. It did apologize, in fairness. But yeah, it's clearly fallible. I guess I don't understand it well enough to get how it read the document incorrectly. I'm baffled.
It's because it's a statistical model that guesses the next word. You asked it to read a document and formulate a response. So, based on responses in the dataset to the documents in the dataset, it chose the words and phrases which were most likely to be in a response.
Statistically, the most likely result the machine could come up with, was that you had used the wrong word. Factually, you did not.
You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.
THIS! I recall somebody doing contract review and having AI summarize the contracts just to see how well they did... The AI left out some really important stuff and also occasionally hallucinated stuff that wasn't there. Summarizing a contract should be pretty black-n-white -- if AI can't handle that properly, I'm not going to trust its summary of something more complex.
6? That's rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.
The Wikipedia marathon doesn't stop til you get to Hitler.
I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.
I've replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p
Wikipedia has an app. It's half of why I Google stuff. Usually a good place for quick answers, and an ok place to start digging in.
I'm half amazed at how bad Google has gotten, but that's probably just me remembering the early days of web searches.
When the old new ways become the old ways and i cant keep up with the new new ways
This grew from ‘I don’t want Wikipedia, I’ll pay $150 a month to Encyclopaedia Brittannica for a set of 60 books the way God intended…’
Encarta FTW
That and TVTropes of course
That website was such a timesink. Amazing.
Let them waste money on generating an AI overview I'll happily skip on my way to the wikipedia link.
Yep. I still have yet to see an actual use for AI. People are like “but summaries!” Summarize this: summaries are only useful if the information being summarized doesn’t matter, which to me means you could just skip the entire thing.
This isn’t a high school test, this is real life. Why are you trying to use SparkNotes?
I still have yet to see an actual use for AI.
It's great for when you want made-up bullshit.
Fake product reviews, for example. AI is fantastic for that. Want to buff up your shitty product's Amazon reviews? AI can generate the text for those reviews perfectly well.
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There's a site for that..let me remember the name.. Wikipedia! There it is.
This is the way
I hate it when i need to google programming stuff because Google Gemini LOVES to make stuff up and takes up half a page trying to answer
I know the rankings change like every month, but isn't Gemini one of the "dumber" ones? I've only tried it a few times and got annoyed, but it's been a while.
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stop googling, start ducking.
is "ducking" an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn't sound any sillier than googling
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If you use Google just type -AI after your search and it removes the AI.
That's right. I didn't put the question in the search bar for you to tell me the answer. That question was the first shoveling of dirt in a 6 hour rabbit hole that I was fixing to explore.
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