I remember seeing a comment on here that said something along the lines of “for every dangerous or wrong response that goes public there’s probably 5, 10 or even 100 of those responses that only one person saw and may have treated as fact”
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Fuck. I'm stealing this comment - it's brilliant.
Tech company creates best search engine —-> world domination —> becomes VC company in tech trench coat —-> destroy search engine to prop up bad investments in ~~artificial intelligence~~ advanced chatbots
Then Hire cheap human intelligence to correct the AIs hallucinatory trash, trained from actual human generated content in the first place which the original intended audience did understand the nuanced context and meaning of in the first place. Wow more like theyve shovelled a bucket of horse manure on the pizza as well as the glue. Added value to the advertisers. AI my arse. I think calling these things language models is being generous. More like energy and data hungry vomitrons.
Calling these things Artificial Intelligence should be a crime. It's false advertising! Intelligence requires critical thought. They possess zero critical thought. They're stochastic parrots, whose only skill is mimicking human language, and they can only mimic convincingly when fed billions of examples.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain
"Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries,"
Ah the good old "the problem is with the user not with our code" argument. The sign of a truly successful software maker.
"We don't understand. Why aren't people simply searching for Taylor Swift"
The reason why Google is doing this is simply PR. It is not to improve its service.
The underlying tech is likely Gemini, a large language model (LLM). LLMs handle chunks of words, not what those words convey; so they have no way to tell accurate info apart from inaccurate info, jokes, "technical truths" etc. As a result their output is often garbage.
You might manually prevent the LLM from outputting a certain piece of garbage, perhaps a thousand. But in the big picture it won't matter, because it's outputting a million different pieces of garbage, it's like trying to empty the ocean with a small bucket.
I'm not making the above up, look at the article - it's basically what Gary Marcus is saying, under different words.
And I'm almost certain that the decision makers at Google know this. However they want to compete with other tendrils of the GAFAM cancer for a turf called "generative models" (that includes tech like LLMs). And if their search gets wrecked in the process, who cares? That turf is safe anyway, as long as you can keep it up with enough PR.
Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users.
There's a three letters word that accurately describes what Google said here: lie.
At some point no amount of PR will hide the fact search has become useless. They know this but they're getting desperate and will try anything.
I'm waiting for Yahoo to revive their link directory or for Mozilla to revive DMOZ. That will be the sign that shit level is officially chin-height.
Correcting over a decade of Reddit shitposting in what, a few weeks? They're pretty ambitious.
This is perhaps the most ironic thing about the whole reddit data scraping thing and Spez selling out the user data of reddit to LLM'S. Like. We spent so much time posting nonsense. And then a bunch of people became mods to course correct subreddits where that nonsense could be potentially fatal. And then they got rid of those mods because they protested. And now it's bots on bots on bots posting nonsense. And they want their LLM'S trained on that nonsense because reasons.
Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.
Good, remove all the weird reddit answers, leaving only the "14 year old neo-nazi" reddit answers, "cop pretending to be a leftist" reddit answers, and "39 year old pedophile" reddit answers. This should fix the problem and restore google back to its defaults
Isn't the model fundamentally flawed if it can't appropriately present arbitrary results? It is operating at a scale where human workers cannot catch every concerning result before users see them.
The ethical thing to do would be to discontinue this failed experiment. The way it presents results is demonstrably unsafe. It will continue to present satire and shitposts as suggested actions.
kinda reads like 'Weird Al' answers.. like, yankovic seems like a nice guy and i like his music, but how many answers could he have?
Wish we would stop using fonts don't think make a clear differences between I and l.
Don't worry, they'll insert it all into captchas and make us label all their data soon.
"Select the URL that answers the question most appropriately"
This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.
I was at first wondering what google had done to piss off Weird Al. He seems so chill.
First Madonna kills Weird Al, and now Google.
WILL THE NIGHTMARE EVER END
If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.
good luck with that.
One of the problems with a giant platform like that is that billions of people are always using it.
Keep poisoning the AI. It's working.
The thing is... google is the one that poisoned it.
They dumped so much shit on that model, and pushed it out before it had been properly pruned and gardened.
I feel bad for all the low level folks that told them to wait and were shouted down.
a lot of shit at corporations works like that.
The worst of it happens in the video game industry. Microtransactions and invasive monetization? Started in the video game industry. Locking pre-installed features behind a paywall? Started in the video game industry. Releasing shit before it's ready to run as intended? Started in the video game industry.
They are going back a century, to the manual teleoperator. When all started, it's the circle of tech
Here's an idea google, why not set it back like it was 10-15 years ago
The problem is, the internet has adapted to the Google of a year ago, which means that setting Google search back to 2009 just means that every "SEO hacker" gets to have a field day to get spam to the top of results without any controls to prevent them.
Google built a search engine optimized for the early internet. Bad actors adapted, to siphon money out of Google traffic. Google adapted to stop them. Bad actors adapted. So began a cat-and-mouse game which ended with the pre-AI Google search we all know and hate today. Through their success, Google has destroyed the internet that was; and all that's left is whatever this is. No matter what happens next, Google search is toast.
If only there was a way to show the whole world in one simple example how Enshitification works.
Google execs: Hold my beer!
[...] a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent.
In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all.
Yeah, it's well known, e.g. people say "the last 20% takes 80% of the effort". All the most tedious and difficult stuff gets postponed to the end, which is why so many side projects never get completed.
It's not just the difficult stuff, but often the mundane, e. g. stability, user friendliness, polish, scalability etc. that takes something from working in a constrained environment to an actual product - it's a chore to work on and a lot less "sexy", with never enough resources allocated to it: We have done all the difficult stuff already, how much more work can this be?
Turns out, a fucking lot.
allowing reddit to train Google's AI was a mistake to begin with. i mean just look at reddit and the shitlord that is spez.
there are better sources and reddit is not one of them.
At this point, it seems like google is just a platform to message a google employee to go google it for you.
I looove how the people at Google are so dumb that they forgot that anything resembling real intelligence in ChatGPT is just cheap labor in Africa (Kenya if I remember correctly) picking good training data. So OpenAI, using an army of smart humans and lots of data built a computer program that sometimes looks smart hahaha.
But the dumbasses in Google really drank the cool aid hahaha. They really believed that LLMs are magically smart so they feed it reddit garbage unfiltered hahahaha. Just from a PR perspective it must be a nigthmare for them, I really can't understand what they were thinking here hahaha, is so pathetically dumb. Just goes to show that money can't buy intelligence I guess.
It's evolving, just backwards.
'I'm sorry, Google, I'm afraid, I cant do that!'