People choose not to choose. They're not interested in engaging with the space or technology any deeper than the default.

Exploiting this fact to the point of defacto monopoly should still be considered wrong.

Just because there is a choice doesn't mean that the casual user is aware of it. You could always chose to install Firefox on Windows, but Microsoft still got done for pushing IE as the default.

I'm not sure the choice between Bing or Google, two search engines controlled by giant corporations who make money from advertising, is enough of a choice for a truly free Internet. And as the Bing outage last week showed us, most other search engines are just Bing repackaged.

I have seen one that was definitely genuine. It had taken information from websites related to an art and writing group I'm a member of, essentially treating several works of fiction (mostly from the 20+ year old content that was written when we were teenagers) as containing factual information about real animals. The person who posted the meme was not a member of the group, but was just pointing out how stupid it was that such obvious fiction was presented as fact. We found it amusing because the AI was pointing to several of the group's sites as places to get more information about these real animals. There is definitely no legit information on those sites.

Remember, folks, the AI's have gobbled up decades worth of teenagers' fanfic and original stories. All the weird shit in those stories is getting regurgitated as though it were real.

In my experience, it has not generated results in real time. I've either gotten the exact same response, or a prompt asking "would you like to generate an AI response to your search?"

So it seems like, and would make sense, that in a given time period they only generate a response once per given search, and reuse that response in the future, since that's far more efficient

I meant, the "no ads" thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

I didn't make my point clear. My question wasn't really where the image was sourced, it was more about the value of what Google is doing matching an essentially random image next to the text it scraped from a website. Why did it choose that image? Adding a random image like that seems like what a low-grade SEO would do to tick the needed boxes not a high-quality product from a multi-billion dollar company. The image in no way enhances the meaning of what I asked. In fact, it does the opposite. It is a bit of Google becoming what it mocked.