Or: Why Your Chatbot Still Sucks, and That’s Okay
By Sailor J | SailorJ.com
The Year Is 1998 (But Make It AI)
If you’re feeling a weird sense of déjà vu using AI tools lately, it’s because we’ve been here before. Not literally—but metaphorically, spiritually, and, frankly, technologically.
Remember the early internet search days? Yahoo directories? AltaVista? Lycos? Ask Jeeves in his little butler suit?
Back then, it was all about crawling everything, indexing everything, and hoping like hell you’d get a relevant result when you typed in “how to unclog toilet using cat litter.”
That’s where we are now—with AI.
AI Is Living Its AltaVista Phase
Everyone and their cousin is making a chatbot.
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT
- Google’s Gemini
- Meta’s LLaMA
- Elon’s Grok
- Claude, Perplexity, and some weirdo thing that only runs on a Raspberry Pi at Burning Man
They’re all big, bloated, and weirdly confident in being wrong.
Like AltaVista in 1999, they’re impressive at first… until you actually use them for something important and end up in a hallucination rabbit hole quoting fake philosophers and citing articles that never existed.
These models don’t know what’s real. They just know what sounds real.
We Haven’t Had the “Google Moment” Yet
Google didn’t win the search wars because it indexed more stuff. It won because it figured out what mattered.
Relevance. Authority. Signal over noise.
The same thing needs to happen with AI. Right now, it’s all noise.
We don’t need more words—we need better judgment.
Most current AIs are like overconfident interns with amnesia and no idea what plagiarism is.
The Dangerous Parallel
Remember when search went from curated to algorithmic? We stopped seeing the best content—we started seeing what the algorithm decided was best. It’s happening again.
AI is quietly shifting from being your helpful assistant to being your informational gatekeeper.
It’s not just answering your questions—it’s deciding what answers are available.
That should terrify you at least a little.
So What Now?
We’re still in the phase where everyone’s building AI like it’s a demo at a tech fair. Bigger, flashier, faster. Nobody’s nailed the holy trinity:
- Trustworthy answers
- Contextual awareness
- Creative thinking instead of remixing Wikipedia and fanfiction
We’re crawling toward the future, but we haven’t stood up yet. The AI revolution is coming—but what you’re seeing now? This is just the MySpace version.
And just like Ask Jeeves, most of these tools are going to be ghosts in GitHub repos five years from now.
The Sniff Test
We don’t post techno-babble without receipts. Here’s some supporting reading:
- Why AI Can’t Replace Human Creativity (Scientific American)
- A Study of GPT-3’s Literary Capabilities (The Atlantic)
- How Search Engines Took Control of Reality (Aeon)
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