do you use free AI tools?

Mainia

Mainia

Joined
Apr 6, 2015
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Location
Upper midwest
How many of you have converted over to using free AI search engines now that they are readily available?

I find I am now exclusively using free AI searches for any searches of the slightest value to me. So 90% of my searches are now AI. I just loaded 2 to top of my browser and will be adding more to find the top 2 with time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The funny thing is I'm going the exact opposite direction.

I do my searches and go directly to the enthusiast forums and communities that better answers the question.

I found that AI was wrong a solid third of the time, and many of the right answers didn't have the depth of details that I need.

I think going to a actual experts, or those with firsthand experience and insight, yields better outcomes.
 
Only for IT troubleshooting; only what comes up in a Google search for a starting point and I always reference at least one more reputable source.
 
I avoid AI. I can parse through the links myself, and possibly learn adjunct information which might not even be related.

I did use it for the first time this morning though, didn’t have the search terms right but it looked like google’s AI had what I was looking for.
 
I'm avoiding AI as much as I can.
It seems to automatically pop up when I google search something.
I only trust it if I kinda already know the answer. I'm not relying on it for something I know nothing about.
 
macarose said:
The funny thing is I'm going the exact opposite direction.

I do my searches and go directly to the enthusiast forums and communities that better answers the question.

I found that AI was wrong a solid third of the time, and many of the right answers didn't have the depth of details that I need.

I think going to a actual experts, or those with firsthand experience and insight, yields better outcomes.
Click to expand...
Yes, I have found that too, if I question it, I keep going to the Google.
 
I have been resistant to AI. While my browser gives me AI responses to questions and searches, I didn't intentionally set it up.

But last week I met with my financial advisor to go over some tax strategy planning. He has an AI that he uses specifically for financial planning scenarios. It was absolutely amazing how powerful it was, in providing solutions and answers. My advisor pointed out that it still takes a trained eye to watch for errors. On at least two occasions it gave wrong answers, and my advisor had to reword the input and try again.

My financial advisor is a math wizard. He can crunch numbers in his head with ease. But the AI saved us a lot of time, even with having to carefully formulate and enter the multiple variables that were needed to get the data we wanted.

So perhaps I'll be using AI more in the future. But I'm still pretty skeptical of the answers they give. I usually fact check AI responses, and find AI about 75% right about 75% of the time.
 
I use it, then think about the answer that it gave me. Is the answer rational, do I need to refine my question to get a better answer? I find the AI answer is blatantly wrong about 25% of the time if you are asking a complex question. The end user still needs to think.

One area AI excels is writing code. I have had reasonably complex tasks that I needed Python, SQL or Shell script. I am not a programmer, but I do have some programming experience. AI gets the scripts correct the first time about 50% of the time. Every other time I have shown it how I want the script improved and it has given me a correctly working script 100% of the time. It's quite impressive.
 
I use it occasionally for code. I find it seems to steal samples from where I searched on.

When someone asks me to do something that is not my job like HR when I had a job req, I ask ChatGPT to write it , make 3 edits and send it to them.
 
I use it to write powershell scripts for me, as I can't code myself. I wish I could write powershell, as the time I spend explaining what I want would have been better used there.

For search - I don't rely on it one bit, except to find links that I can inspect myself.

As for google - it has gone tremendously downhill lately. Once set to search verbatim and with no ai it is a bit less bad, but it's still quite awful.

Here's a useful link on how to force google search without Ai:

https://udm14.org/
And this is the string to put to Google search itself to skip the Ai answers. It still works, not sure for how long:
https://www.google.com/webhp?udm=14
 
The data AI models learn can be quite old. An old fashioned search on StartPage.com or Google (if you are not worried about privacy) will result in more relevant information.

AI models are good for tedious tasks like coding, legal research, etc. - the result sill vary based on the prompts. I use Deepseek as it seems to be the best for what I need.
 
For me, it still is—but it used to be really popular to "Google" something. Oh, just Google it. And that was because you would get an immediate, accurate answer to what you were looking for.
Then, I'm not sure exactly when, but a few years ago they changed the algorithm, and now I can’t find anything. I’m not trying to get into the dead internet theory, but that’s almost what it feels like.
Then Grok3 came along, and I started getting incredibly fast, accurate answers. Obviously, it’s still wrong sometimes, but for the most part, I don’t use internet search engines anymore—they just don’t seem to know anything now. Even you tube wont show me videos relating to what I typed in anymore, it is all a curated algorithm.
 
bioilcurious said:
For me, it still is—but it used to be really popular to "Google" something. Oh, just Google it. And that was because you would get an immediate, accurate answer to what you were looking for.
Then, I'm not sure exactly when, but a few years ago they changed the algorithm, and now I can’t find anything. I’m not trying to get into the dead internet theory, but that’s almost what it feels like.
Then Grok3 came along, and I started getting incredibly fast, accurate answers. Obviously, it’s still wrong sometimes, but for the most part, I don’t use internet search engines anymore—they just don’t seem to know anything now. Even you tube wont show me videos relating to what I typed in anymore, it is all a curated algorithm.
Click to expand...
They tried to push the transformation to an online store rather than search engine at the same time as ai got able to generate search result poison in almost real time.
 
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