Previously, I had observed that low grade content mills were displacing authoritative information in Google searches about the Python programming language. Today, I can report that this situation is now changing.

I was googling about how to do certain operations with Python basic data types. Eight years ago, you’d get the official Python documentation, usually the very page that had an authoritative answer, or maybe a Stack Overflow question that was the same as yours depending on how complex your question was. Earlier this year, you’d get a giant list of content farm 2-second tutorials written by a fetus. Now, you get a code snippet written by generative AI right before all of the trash results.

I did not take any of the code snippets and run them directly. However, I did find them pedagogically useful. I could read them all very quickly to determine if they were the right thing to do, because they were short and to the point. If they were not the right thing to do, I had something concrete I could use to refine the question further.

This might be the first use of AI that I have found immediately useful in a natural, unobtrusive way while trying to do work. I enjoy chatting with Gippity, but that is a separate activity outside of how I typically do work. I occasionally use Gippity for work related purposes, but usually it’s for something special, like reading a bunch of logs I don’t want to or helping me draft correspondence. It’s kind of nicer to just have AI right in the middle of what I was doing.

On the one hand, I think it is fantastic that the Generative AI at Google cut through a giant pile of noob bait garbage and gave me a useful answer immediately. On the other hand, the eventual goal of these AI systems seems to be to replace search with someone who tells you answers that you are expected to eventually treat as authoritative. I can independently assess whether code snippets do as they are supposed to, because I can run them and see what they do. How can I independently assess if Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts?

It’s the strangest time that we live in today.