Thanks for sharing this. I’m simultaneously appalled and delighted with AI. I don’t like its climate impact and how it may be dumbing down our critical thinking skills, but yesterday it very efficiently informed me of the optimal time to plant grass seed in my zone, and the deadline for appealing my property assessment with my county. 🧐

If I just use a search engine, giving just keywords, does it use AI? It gives me a list of links and maybe some text from the link. I’ve been doing that for years, so now I wonder. And now some search engines provide an AI-generated response, in addition to a list of links.

bpath I am no AI expert but this might be helpful - part from searching beyond AI answers and part from personal experience. If you are using Google for a search, most of the time the first response will be from Gemini, Google's A - not always but pretty frequently. Much of the time all it's done is aggregate info from what would have been the first few responses, sometimes only from the first one. But if you follow what ever it is you're searching for with -ai (minus ai) the AI response isn't eliminated but it's thrown further down the page and your search results will look like they used to. Not perfect but often works. It seems to work best with the most simple requests, the types of things we used to search for. Many of us now are not really doing a search but asking for information on a specific topic or answers to a question and AI steps in.