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If the AI was searching then it's about as valuable as searching it yourself, which is how everyone learns everything now.
If they had AI guess with no search grounding, then yeah, that's useless
This is not true. AI search is not programmed to be critical of sources, so it becomes a pure garbage in garbage out situation.
On heavily SEOed queries, AI search is in fact much much worse than just asking the AI directly. In August 2025 I will not touch "grounded" AI with a 10 foot pole it's dogshit.
This guy asked AI for a "grounded" query and the AI happily cited a fake scam website front and center.
I just read that whole comment thread, very interesting.
It's been a few years (sad) since I grew anything and I forgot how awful the SEO was in the plant space, holy shit lmao.
The basil article was an infinite rabbit hole of AI basil articles linking to AI basil articles.
I don't think most humans are much better at detecting SEO slop, but that's not a very high bar.
Personally, I find AI search quite useful (both personally and at work) but I mostly use it as a results aggregator. I check the links it finds me, especially at work, my biggest fear is to confidently present something that turns out to be an AI hallucination.
So it's pretty great for that, it's basically like having an intern who Googles things for me, and I pick the results to look at in more detail personally.
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