I really really don't want to make complaining about dumb LLM stuff my entire online personality, but dumb LLM stuff keeps happening. I regret to inform you that not only do some people not check whether the LLM-generated "summary" they get when they do a web search is correct; not only do they have zero comprehension of what they're even looking at and how it differs from the way that a web search worked ten years ago; they may *literally be unable to understand whether the summary has answered their question*. This is a thing that I have actually seen with my eyeballs in the wild. A recent episode of a TV series I'm watching was dedicated to someone's memory. In a discussion forum, one poster wondered who that person was, and another poster helpfully provided the "answer" they got "from Google", which was clearly generated, and said something like: "Sometimes when a person involved with a TV production dies, the crew dedicates an episode to their memory. For example, a recent episode of $SERIES was dedicated to $PERSON." Zero information about the identity of the person. The first poster said something like "thanks, that's very interesting." This is very cool and normal, and definitely isn't causing any problems. A concrete call to action, so that this isn't just a doompost: if there are people in your life who are less technically-minded than you are, and who trust your technical expertise to some extent -- try to explain to them what is happening here, and how they can try to avoid it. Maybe construct a demo using a knowledge domain that they know very well. Maybe offer to configure their default search engine to strip out the bullshit. Obviously that doesn't solve the problem of the slop farms flooding the search results, but you could show them how to recognise a slop farm, and the "back in time" trick for finding pre-collapse content (not that that's foolproof, since some slop farms backdate their pages). Please have these conversations even if your view of LLM features in search engines is more positive than mine (that's a low bar). I hope that we can at least agree that people should make informed decisions about these tools, and that is not something that we can take for granted.