Self-styled AI: "At enormous cost of electricity and manpower, people are being given something worse than a 1998 search engine."

An excellent comment from NLR expresses a valid insight concerning current "AI":

It feels weird reading machine produced writing (and I try to avoid it) because I know it's just words strung together with no understanding. 

I'd rather read a well-written article by a human. Old search engines were good at finding those, even the old pages of links were helpful for that. 

At enormous cost of electricity and manpower, people are being given something worse than a 1998 search engine. And yet we're supposed to believe that we're now more advanced and smarter than ever.

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Few people realize - or perhaps they can't remember, or don't believe - how incredibly powerful and useful search engines were twenty years ago. 

I was editing the journal Medical Hypotheses at that time, a job that entailed a great deal of web searching, and could find almost anybody or anything, on any subject - with that information's source and provenance; updated with newly posted material (if necessary) more than once a minute. The Google search engine, in particular, was then a superb tool. 

It strikes me that the truly colossal degradation of search engines over the past 15 years - to the current point of near uselessness - may have been part of a strategy preparing for the top-down imposition of current "AI".