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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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aren't in the business of selling answers

They plainly are. When I give Bing/Google a question in a natural way it tries it damnest to give me an answer, even if half the time that answer is spam and the other half of the time the answer is gaslighting me about something I clearly know not to be the case irl.

Fair point, but are you the purchaser, or the product, when doing so?

It's currently direct enough that you can put blame somewhere, but I don't think Google expect that use case to be where and how it makes its money from Gemini (or future LLMs), any more than the open testing grounds directly talking to the thing are.