Enshittifying Search With AI
Current Status: Entering Stage Two
Meilisearch is sticking its toe into second stage waterstktktk maybe not a textbook example, but there's nothing closer if it's not. They're working with a company named OpenAItktktk hugging face is also an option to provide the AI features. At this point, it's not required. But, if you wanted to use this new AI feature it would cost you.
And, clearly, it's not better for the folks who use Meilisearch for this type of search tktktk list other cases.
The Moral Results
Even if the AI results were both better and free to the customer, they wouldn't be worth it. AI services like the one from OpenAI require a tremendous amount of power to run compared to their output. Many use copyrighted material without permission and ignore requests from websites to no scrape their pages into the AI systems.
TODO
Traffic hitting sites (e.g. open source projects)
Environmental impact
Costs money to turn this on.
Think about this being medical records.
End note about generative AI
Talk about the time jumps and human perception and how it kinda doesn't matter from the human perception, but when you're a business all that time adds up and burns away time on the servers that cost money and burn resources. (tktktk fix burn used twice there)
Point out that there may be cases where the search quality is better, or at least the same with AI as the non-AI version. If you have real-world examples of that, please send them my way. (I'd also like to see the cost in user time and experience and payment to OpenAi associated with those results.)
Maybe reference this page which has the examples of "pink sandals" vs "pink summer shoes for girls"
https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/ai_powered_search/difference_full_text_ai_search
They talk about the differneces in the results, but it seems ungeniue to not do "pink sandals for girls".
(In both the examples they use, they specifically avoid using the word 'sandals' in the second search they say AI would do better in)
Point out that tagging is a thing. If "summer shoes" really should return results with sandals adding tags to the search data (that's may or may not be visible to users) would get the results to show up.
Could pull in the 'Uses cases' section from this page:
https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/ai_powered_search/difference_full_text_ai_search
Note that part of the problem is that the demo they have is best suited to the regular use case and not the AI based one. If they really want to show of AI (and not make it look awful) they should have chosen a case where it works better.
But, that's part of the problem with the current trend in AI of "just stick it everywhere"
Note that Hugging Face can also be used, but is much more limited in the AI offering.
See: https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/ai_powered_search/choose_an_embedder
Note that you're being a little loose with the defintion of enshittification, but the overall vibe works prefectly.
Footnotes
The search engine I loved using and was once happy to recommend.
My Grimoire is my personal Book of Magic. Some might call it a notes app. That sounds too mundane for my liking. Especially because I can write programs that run inside it. Just like casting spells. Check out My Grimoire if your interested in learning more.
"The pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders."