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”
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"
I mean...I guess you could parahrase it that way. I took it more as "Look, you probably aren't going to run into any weird answers.". Which seems like a valid thing for them to try to convey.
(That being said, fuck AI, fuck Google, fuck reddit.)
"I'm feeling depressed" is not an uncommon query under capitalism run amok. "One Reddit user recommends jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge" is not just a weird answer, it is a wholly irresponsible one.
So, no, their response is not valid. It is entirely user-blaming in order to avoid culpability.
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.
Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.
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.
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?
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"
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.
If only there was a way to show the whole world in one simple example how Enshitification works.
Google execs: Hold my beer!
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.
They are going back a century, to the manual teleoperator. When all started, it's the circle of tech
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.
[...] 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.
At this point, it seems like google is just a platform to message a google employee to go google it for you.
'I'm sorry, Google, I'm afraid, I cant do that!'
Okay Google... I'm about to go to sleep but I must know something before I go.... If I could get the perfect penis to attract my perfect female counterpart, describe my penis, where my wife put it and how many pieces did she cut it to. Most importantly, will the scars make ribbed for her pleasure?
Probably one of the shitstains in Google's C-suite after having signed a "wonderful" contract to get access to "all that great data from Reddit" forced the Techies to use it against their better judgement and advice.
It would certainly match the kind of thing I've seen more than once were some MBA makes a costly decision with technical implications without consulting the actual techies first, then the thing turns out to be a massive mistake and to save themselves they just double up and force the techies to use it anyway.
That said, that's normally about some kind of tooling or framework from a 3rd party supplier that just makes life miserable for those forced to use it or simply doesn't solve the problem and techies have to quietly use what they wanted to use all along and then make believe they're using the useless "sollution" that cost lots of $$$ in yearly licensing fees, and stuff like this that ends up directly and painfully torpedoing at the customer-facing end the strategical direction the company is betting on for the next decade, is pretty unusual.
I once had a Christmas day post blow up and become top of the day from a stupid pic I uploaded. I wonder if some of those comments or a weird version of that pic will pop up. Anyone that had similar things happen should keep their eye out. Anything that blew up probably gets a bit more weight.
Oh God, cumbox! All of cumbox is in there. I wonder what kind of unrelated search could summon up that bit of fuzzy fun?
Is Google not using a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system with their llms?
They are, but they're retrieving Reddit comments, often just straight shitposts
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
