A Redditor on the aptly named r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit recently claimed something most of us can agree with: "Google AI is going to kill someone with stuff like this. The correct torque is 98 lbs."
The post was in response to Google's AI producing a decidedly undervalued result concerning the lug nut torque on a 2015 Nissan Frontier. The OP is correct. In fact, the average lug nut torque across most Nissan, Toyota, and Honda models is between 75 and 85 pounds, depending on the few outliers you may or may not include.
Worse, this isn't difficult information to locate on the web, something Google AI (Gemini) should easily be able to do.
AI can be useful, but it should never be trusted as a valuable source of research or information, even if you're in a hurry. The frustration with AI doesn't end there.
Seemingly overnight, it exploded onto the scene to such a degree that it's incorporated into nearly everything, including smartphones, search engines (even those not named Google), the healthcare industry, manufacturing, security, data analysis, education systems, customer service, and on and on it goes.
Therein, an even larger problem lies: progress versus cost. It takes an immense amount of energy and water to fuel AI. While many "AI"-labeled results are really just pre-processed search results rather than custom-answered every single time, the overall effect of AI's pervasiveness is still a concern. According to Goldman Sachs, the power demand for data centers will grow by 160% in well under a decade.
Where will that energy come from? Nuclear is the knee-jerk response, a clean power source that has a good deal of support from the majority of Americans. But AI is far outstripping any infrastructural planning for a nuclear future, which is mostly a talking point rather than a projected reality.
Most of the energy running these power-gluttonous data centers is derived from fossil fuels. Often enough, AI doesn't get things right while also gobbling up fossil fuels, further endangering the planet. The tradeoff is less than worth it.
MetaGer, Ekoru, and Ecosia are clean, energy-friendly search engine alternatives to Google. You can also change the web filter in your search engine to avoid AI results. Don't depend on AI. As one response post pointed out: "It's a large language model, basically fancy predictive text - it can't solve problems, only string words together."
Another response encapsulates how useless Google's search engine can be: "My current favorite is Google boosting anything claiming to be a law firm to the top of the results."
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