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Comment by JacobAsmuth | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that there's at technical reason? Or not really

Right now if you google "zelda" a Master Sword will appear in the bottom right corner. If you click on the sword it will open a 1998 version google with a search of "zelda".

They clearly have the ability to disable AI in search but just refuse to.

What you’re calling “a 1998 version Google” is obviously just a visual skin. The search results are the same ones, so the ranking algorithms are the same, and AFAIK it’s well known that they’ve used AI for a while.

And getting rid of the AI is removing one tab and one div. It's less than a skin.

The complaint is not about the search results or ranking algorithms...

No. You can just append "&udm=14" to your Google search URL to remove AI overview.

Could a school district IT employee automatically append this to all search requests sent over their network?

They would have to be using ssl decryption to append it at the network level. There may be extensions that would do it though?

most schools already are

I actually made an extension that hides the AI results (using a different method), and which works across Google, Bing, and other search engines. [1]

It's 100% free (of tracking and cost).

1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...

Yeah, we are still needing a way to modify webpages. Hiding a div on a web page is about ~1 line javascript, and there is no way to inspect and share it.

Extensions are a security risk, userscripts are a security risk as well. Too bad all the current browsers are user antagonistic :|

Even if you disable the 'AI overview', the search results themselves are powered by AI models as well. They have been since at least ~2018 with BERT.

No one's objecting to that aspect of things.

Won't be first time there's unexpected consequences due to how someone formed the legal argument

What about if results are (re)ranked using an LLM? It's not inconceivable that they would do this.

For schools, I think if you just let them turn off the AI summaries everyone would be fairly happy.

Maybe, but not necessarily. For example, I recently searched for someone who worked at a company using a plain language query. The AI identified one person (correctly, as it happens), but all the links below were to different people.

Obviously the results were not driven by the same AI that produced the summary.

Please comment in good faith. The discussion is about generative AI.

https://share.google/aimode/OzUfGVdAN6yJ1J3eH

If I understand correctly, they already exclude AI overviews for under-18 users in the EU to comply with local laws.

This is software, there are no constraints. Technology is about political control and this is Google trying to exert it over school children.

They can be cute and say that the search results are AI, which while technically true is probably not what most people mean when they say they don't want AI. They could literally just disable the AI Overview at the top and that's what most schools mean when they say they don't want AI features.

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