Follow up (Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen)

Back last year, I wrote Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen.

An update: yeah! Trusting LLMs to be search engines is turning out to be pretty bad, as The Atlantic covers in Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized. There's a whole category of companies doing Answer Engine Optimization which do the double disservice of making the web worse by auto-publishing slop and making answers worse by getting them to favor the ones who pay for the privilege.

They're also auto-posting slop on Reddit to get LLMs to recommend gray-market peptide supplements! Reddit is cracking down on this partly by just banning posting in some communities because the robots are so bad.

This sucks!