This already happens, no AI necessary.

All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn't be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.

Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.

I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.

The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It's like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.

Edit: And I didn't even mention the "right to be forgotten." That also exists in the EU.

From what I understand, Elon Musk literally said he wants to change Grok so it performs literally this.

I'd like to think that a move like that would kill Google (as the search leader) but I bet there are a lot of people who would find it easier to use and never question the results.

There are already AI models trained for distributing intentional misinformation. Grok and DeepSeek are two such examples.

Commercial AIs are already censored black boxes.

Traditional search engines like Google can already do that, though.

Unpopular opinion - yes but not exactly

Searching the web is/was always like making a prompt. The difference before the current AI hype was that it was a different kind of algorithm, but still an algorithm tailored to make profit for the company. Or in other words, it was never in the user’s control on what information is received from the web. That is the nature of the web itself until, to some extent, we hopefully reach a dystopian decentralised non profit web. And hey we might even get there because you are reading this on Lemmy.

An increasing number of people I know already go straight to ChatGPT to search for things that are not direct websites links.