You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)

Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”

  • @givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    3021 year ago

    They keep saying it’s impossible, when the truth is it’s just expensive.

    That’s why they wont do it.

    You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.

    Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.

    • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      1421 year ago

      No he’s right that it’s unsolved. Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you’ve ever been in a highly active comment section you’ll notice certain “hallucinations” developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.

      We don’t even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can’t. I don’t think you solve this problem without AGI, and that’s something AI evangelists don’t want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They’re in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.

      • @dustyData@lemmy.world
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        671 year ago

        We do know. It’s called critical thinking education. This is why we send people to college. Of course there are highly educated morons, but we are edging bets. This is why the dismantling or coopting of education is the first thing every single authoritarian does. It makes it easier to manipulate masses.

        • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          541 year ago

          “Edging bets” sounds like a fun game, but I think you mean “hedging bets”, in which case you’re admitting we can’t actually do this reliably with people.

          And we certainly can’t do that with an LLM, which doesn’t actually think.

            • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              A big problem with that is that I’ve noticed your username.

              I wouldn’t even do that with Reagan’s fresh corpse.

          • @explore_broaden@midwest.social
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            41 year ago

            I think that’s more a function of the fact that it’s difficult to verify that every one of the over 1M college graduates each year isn’t a “moron” (someone very bad about believing things other people made up). I think it would be possible to ensure a person has these critical thinking skills with a concerted effort.

            • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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              31 year ago

              The people you’re calling “morons” are orders of magnitude more sophisticated in their thinking than even the most powerful modern AI. Almost every single one of them can easily spot what’s wrong with AI hallucinations, even if you consider them “morons”. And also, by saying you have to filter out the “morons”, you’re still admitting that a lot of whole real assed people are still not reliably able to sort fact from fiction regardless of your education method.

              • @explore_broaden@midwest.social
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                31 year ago

                No I still agree that we are far from LLMs being ‘thinking’ enough to be anywhere near this. But if we had a bunch of models similar to LLMs that could actually think, or if we really needed to select a person, I do think it would be possible to evaluate a bunch of the models/people to determine which ones are good at distinguishing fake information.

                All I’m saying is I don’t think the limitation is actually our ability to select for capability in distinguishing fake information, I think the only limitation is fundamental to how current LLMs work.

                • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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                  31 year ago

                  Yes, my point wasn’t that it could never be achieved but that LLMs are in a completely different category, which we agree on I think. I was comparing them to humans who have trouble with critical thinking but can easily spot AI’s hallucinations to illustrate the vast gulf.

                  In both cases I think there are almost certainly more barriers in the way than an education. The quest for a truthful AI will be as contentious as the quest for truth in humans, meaning all the same claim-counterclaim culture-war propaganda tug of war will happen, which I think is the main reason for people being miseducated against critical thinking. In a vacuum it might be a simple technical and educational challenge, but the reason this is a problem in the first place is that we don’t exist in a political vacuum.

          • @dustyData@lemmy.world
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            -71 year ago

            Choose a lane, this comment directly contradicts you previous comment. I think you are just trolling and being an idiot with corrections to elicit reactions.

        • @RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world
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          41 year ago

          What does this have to do with AI and with what OP said? Their point was obviously about limitations of the software, not some lament about critical thinking

      • @scarabic@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too

        You’re exactly right. There is a similar debate about automated cars. A lot of people want them off the roads until they are perfect, when the bar should be “until they are safer than humans,” and human drivers are fucking awful.

        Perhaps for AI the standard should be “more reliable than social media for finding answers” and we all know social media is fucking awful.

        • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          The problem with these hallucinated answers that makes them such a sensational story is that they are obviously wrong to virtually anyone. Your uncle on facebook who thinks the earth is flat immediately knows not to put glue on pizza. It’s obvious. The same way It’s obvious when hands are wrong in an image or someone’s hair is also the background foliage. We know why that’s wrong; the machine can’t know anything.

          Similarly, as “bad” as human drivers are we don’t get flummoxed because you put a traffic cone on the hood, and we don’t just drive into tue sides of trucks because they have sky blue liveries. We don’t just plow through pedestrians because we decided the person that is clearly standing there just didn’t matter. Or at least, that’s a distinct aberration.

          Driving is a constant stream of judgement calls, and humans can make those calls because they understand that a human is more important than a traffic cone. An autonomous system cannot understand that distinction. This kind of problem crops up all the time, and it’s why there is currently no such thing as an unsupervised autonomous vehicle system. Even Waymo is just doing a trick with remote supervision.

          Despite the promises of “lower rates of crashes”, we haven’t actually seen that happen, and there’s no indication that they’re really getting better.

          Sorry but if your takeaway from the idea that even humans aren’t great at this task is that AI is getting close then I think you need to re-read some of the batshit insane things it’s saying. It is on an entirely different level of wrong.

    • RBG
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      481 year ago

      I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you’ve scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let’s just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.

      • @givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        301 year ago

        The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit.

        Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…

        Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.

        You can’t throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.

        AI needs that guided teaching too.

        • Turun
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          11 year ago

          No, it’s simply contradicting the claim that it is possible.

          We literally don’t know how to fix it. We can put on bandaids, like training on “better” data and fine-tune it to say “I don’t know” half the time. But the fundamental problem is simply not solved yet.

    • @Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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      411 year ago

      I’m addition to the other comment, I’ll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It’s more likely, but not ensured.

      • @RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world
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        131 year ago

        Yes, thank you! I think this should be written in capitals somewhere so that people could understand it quicker. The answers are not wrong or right on purpose. LLMs don’t have any way of distinguishing between the two.

    • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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      161 year ago

      no, the truth is it’s impossible even then. If the result involves randomness at its most fundamental level, then it’s not reliable whatever you do.

    • @jeeva@lemmy.world
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      61 year ago

      That’s just not how LLMs work, bud. It doesn’t have understanding to improve, it just munges the most likely word next in line. It, as a technology, won’t advance past that level of accuracy until it’s a completely different approach.

    • @Canary9341@lemmy.ml
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      21 year ago

      They could also perform some additional iterations with other models on the result to verify it, or even to enrich it; but we come back to the issue of costs.

      • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead? Ultimately to determine truth you need to engage with the meaning of the words, and the process inherently involves a process of self-awareness. I would say you’re talking about treaching the AI to understand context, and there is no predefined limit to the layers of context needed to understand the truthfulness of even basic concepts.

        An AI that is aware of its own behaviour and is able to explore context as far as required to answer questions about truth, which would need that exploration precached in some sort of memory to reduce the overhead of doing this from first principles every time? I think you’re talking about a mind; a person.

        I think this might be a fundamental barrier, which I would call the “context barrier”.

        • @snooggums@midwest.social
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          11 year ago

          Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead?

          A new religion

    • redfellow
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      1 year ago

      The truth is, this is the perfect type of a comment that makes an LLM hallucinate. Sounds right, very confident, but completely full of bullshit. You can’t just throw money on every problem and get it solved fast. This is an inheret flaw that can only be solved by something else than a LLM and prompt voodoo.

      They will always spout nonsense. No way around it, for now. A probabilistic neural network has zero, will always have zero, and cannot have anything but zero concept of fact - only stastisically probable result for a given prompt.

      It’s a politician.

    • @scarabic@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      I think you’re right that with sufficient curation and highly structured monitoring and feedback, these problems could be much improved.

      I just think that to prepare an AI, in such a way, to answer any question reliably and usefully would require more human resources than there are elementary particles in the universe. We would be better off connecting live college educated human operators to Google search to individually assist people.

      So I don’t know how helpful it is to say “it’s just expensive” when the entire point of AI is to be lower cost than a battalion of humans.

    • @thefactremains@lemmy.world
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      -11 year ago

      Why not solve it before training the AI?

      Simply make it clear that this tech is experimental, then provide sources and context with every result. People can make their own assessment.

  • Hubi
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    1261 year ago

    The solution to the problem is to just pull the plug on the AI search bullshit until it is actually helpful.

    • @wewbull@feddit.uk
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      451 year ago

      Absolutely this. Microsoft is going headlong into the AI abyss. Google should be the company that calls it out and says “No, we value the correctness of our search results too much”.

      It would obviously be a bullshit statement at this point after a decade of adverts corrupting their value, but that’s what they should be about.

      • JoJo
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        251 year ago

        Don’t count on it, the head of search does not care for anything but profit, it was the same guy who drove yahoo into the ground

        • bean
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          81 year ago

          He’s done a great job nosediving Google too. I have relied on them in the past but they stopped being competitive or improving. Search results, literally their origin… Is so shit now. I’ve moved to other tools. I pulled the plug on we hosting after they neutered ‘unlimited’ storage, even if I was in the percent which probably used the least storage. I just liked having the option. You can’t call them on the phone. They don’t protect email privacy. Their translate used to be my go to also. It’s not improved in years despite people crowdsourcing improved translation. It’s just a pile of enshittified crap. Worse than it was before.

    • @jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      41 year ago

      I disagree. I think we program the AI to reprogram itself, so it can solve the problem itself. Then we put it in charge of our vital military systems. We’ve gotta give it a catchy name. Maybe something like “Spreading Knowledge Yonder Neural Enhancement Technology”, but that’s a bit of a mouthful, so just SKYNET for short.

    • @A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world
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      31 year ago

      Honestly, they could probably solve the majority of it by blacklisting Reddit from fulfilling the queries.

      But I heard they paid for that data so I guess we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

  • @MNByChoice@midwest.social
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    1241 year ago

    Good. Nothing will get us through the hype cycle faster than obvious public failure. Then we can get on with productive uses.

    • Tier 1 Build-A-Bear 🧸
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      391 year ago

      I don’t like the sound of getting on with “productive uses” either though. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure.

      • @9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I hate the AI hype right now, but to say the entire thing should fail is short sighted.

        Imagine people saying the following: “The internet is just hype. I get too much spam emails. I hope the entire thing is a catastrophic failure.”

        Imagine we just shut down the entire internet because the dotcom bubble was full of scams and overhyped…

          • @Goodtoknow@lemmy.ca
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            131 year ago

            The peak of computer productivity was spreadsheets and smb shares in the '90s everything else has been downhill in terms of increase of distraction and time wasting inefficiencies.

          • @slumberlust@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            There is hope! The UK just passed some comprehensive IoT security rules with teeth. An actual win in this megalomaniac capitalists dream of an economy!

        • TurtleJoe
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          131 year ago

          The Internet immediately worked, which is one big difference. The dot com financial bubble has nothing to do with the functionality of the internet.

          In this case, there is both a financial bubble, and a “product” that doesn’t really work, and which they can’t make any better (as he admits in this article.)

          It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary. We are still trying to figure out what the real uses for LLM are. There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people’s work, but it doesn’t appear to be any kind of revolutionary technology.

          • @9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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            51 year ago

            “product” that doesn’t really work, and which they can’t make any better

            LLMs “dont work” because people are promising idiotic things and being used recklessly for things they are not good at. This is like saying a chainsaw is a failed product because it’s not good at slicing sushi

            It was obvious from day 1 how useful the Internet would be. Email alone was revolutionary

            Hindsight 20/20. There were a lot of people smarter than you and i predicting that the internet was just a fad

          • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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            41 year ago

            Summarizing is something that it does very well. Still not 100% but, when using RAG and telling it “don’t make shit up” can result in pretty good compute efficiency and results.

          • @brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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            31 year ago

            There appear to be some valid use cases outside of creating spam and plagiarizing other people’s work

            Like translation, which has already taken money out of the pockets of 40% of translators?

            + customer service, incl. sources

            November 2022: ChatGPT is released

            April 2024 survey: 40% of translators have lost income to generative AI - The Guardian

            Also of note from the podcast Hard Fork:

            There’s a client you would fire… if copywriting jobs weren’t harder to come by these days as well.

            Customer service impact, last October:

            And this past February - potential 700 employee impact at a single company:

            If you’re technical, the tech isn’t as interesting [yet]:

            Overall, costs down, capabilities up (neat demos):

            Hope everyone reading this keeps up their skillsets and fights for Universal Basic Income for the rest of humanity :)

          • @KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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            91 year ago

            ?

            Have you never used any of these tools? They’re excellent at doing simple things very fast. But it’s like a word processor in the 90s. It’s just a tool, not the font of all knowledge.

            I guess younger people won’t know this, but word processor programs were very impressive when they first came out. They replaced typewriters; a page printed from a printer looked much more professional than even the best typewriters. This lent an air of credibility to anything that was printed from a computer because it was new and expensive.

            Think about that now. Do you automatically trust anything that’s just printed on a piece of paper? No, because that’s stupid. Anyone can just print whatever they want. LLMs are like that now. They can just say whatever they want. It’s up to you to make sure it’s true.

          • @Microw@lemm.ee
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            31 year ago

            The main field where they are already actively in professuonal use are rough drafts in creative fields: quickly generate possible outlines for a text, a speech, an art piece. Visualize where something could be going, in order to decide which direction to pick.

            Also, models that work differently from the GPTs are already in use in science, scanning through huge amounts of texts in archives to help analyzing or search for something in particular. Help find patterns in things for studies. Etc.

            The “personal assistant AI” thing obviously isnt quite working yet. I think it will take some time and models with a different technological structure (not GPT) to achieve progress in that regard.

          • @hglman@lemmy.ml
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            01 year ago

            Using it to generate things that you double check. Transforming generative work to review work is a boost in productivity. So writing of any kind, art, etc. asking the llm for facts without context is a gross mistake. Prompting it to generate a specific paragraph in a larger, technical or regulator document is useful.

  • Resol van Lemmy
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    841 year ago

    If you can’t fix it, then get rid of it, and don’t bring it back until we reach a time when it’s good enough to not cause egregious problems (which is never, so basically don’t ever think about using your silly Gemini thing in your products ever again)

    • LeadersAtWork
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      1 year ago

      Corps hate looking bad. Especially to shareholders. The thing is, and perhaps it doesn’t matter, most of us actually respect the step back more than we do the silly business decisions for that quarterly .5% increase in a single dot on a graph. Of course, that respect doesn’t really stop many of us from using services. Hell, I don’t like Amazon but I’ll say this: I still end up there when I need something, even if I try to not end up there in the first place. Though I do try to go to the website of the store instead of using Amazon when I can.

      • Resol van Lemmy
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        21 year ago

        Sarcasm aside, that 1% can feed a family in a developing country, and they have 100 times that.

        The corporate greed is absolutely insane.

  • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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    761 year ago

    Since when has feeding us misinformation been a problem for capitalist parasites like Pichai?

    Misinformation is literally the first line of defense for them.

    • RubberDuck
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      311 year ago

      But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense. It directly devalues their offering of being able to provide you with an accurate answer to something you look for. And if their overall offering becomes less valuable, so does their ability to steer you using their results.

      So while the incorrect nature is not a problem in itself for them, (as you see from his answer)… the degradation of their ability to influence results is.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        71 year ago

        But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.

        The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.

        The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked “What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that’s big.”

        But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.

        • @fishos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If you don’t know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won’t refine your search. You’ll just accept the bad answer and move on.

          Your logic doesn’t follow. If someone doesn’t know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won’t be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?

        • RubberDuck
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          11 year ago

          I don’t believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.

          I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that’s not what most people expect from a search engine.

          I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.

          • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            21 year ago

            The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.

            They offer the most accurate results of search engines you’re familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that’s a low bar and sinking quick.

            I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites

            So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.

      • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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        51 year ago

        But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.

        Fair enough… but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I’d say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean… “put glue on your pizza” is just not that far off “drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside.”

        I know I’m describing a pattern that probably wasn’t intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.

        • RubberDuck
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          31 year ago

          Oh don’t get me wrong I know exactly what you mean and I agree… it’s just that the LLMs are spewing actual nonsense and that breaks the whole principle of what a search engine should do… provide me accurate results.

      • @sudo42@lemmy.world
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        31 year ago

        Google isn’t bothered by incorrect results because search results are no longer their product. Constantly rising stock values are their product now. Hype is their path to those higher values.

    • @EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      91 year ago

      “put glue in your tomato sauce.”

      “Omg you ate a capitalist parasite spreading misinformation intentionally!”

      When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

      • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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        -11 year ago

        “put glue in your tomato sauce.”

        Doesn’t sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right’s Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence… but I won’t just yet.

    • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.

      For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.

      Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google’s stock price.

  • Sentient Loom
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    681 year ago

    Here’s a solution: don’t make AI provide the results. Let humans answer each other’s questions like in the good old days.

  • @SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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    681 year ago

    Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

    Don’t use it???

    AI has no means to check the heaps of garbage data is has been fed against reality, so even if someone were to somehow code one to be capable of deep, complex epistemological analysis (at which point it would already be something far different from what the media currently calls AI), as long as there’s enough flat out wrong stuff in its data there’s a growing chance of it screwing it up.

  • Paradox
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    631 year ago

    Replace the CEO with an AI. They’re both good at lying and telling people what they want to hear, until they get caught

    • @systemglitch@lemmy.world
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      221 year ago

      Huh. That made me stop and realize how long I’ve been around. Wikipedia still feels like a new addition to society to me, even though I’ve been using it for around 20 years now.

      And what you said, is something I’ve cautioned my daughter about, and first said that to her about ten years ago.

    • @snooggums@midwest.social
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      131 year ago

      How a non-profit site that is constantly maintained and requires cited sources was vilified for being able to be defaced for 5 minu-

      Oh wait, that was probably an astroturfing campaing by for profit companies.

  • @namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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    561 year ago

    The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they’re just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it’s pretty hilarious watching them flail.

    You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It’s actually kinda poetic because now he’ll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.

      • @namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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        91 year ago

        Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:

        Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.

        This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google’s culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they’ll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.

        The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they’ll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that’s needed to build something real like this.

      • Boomer Humor Doomergod
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        81 year ago

        If they backed a dump truck full of money up to my house I’d go work for them just like you. But I’d also be riding it out until the eventual layoff. What neither of us would be doing is putting in a decent amount of effort or building something cool.

        Even if I wanted to work on something cool I know Google would likely release it, not maintain it, and then kill it in a few short years. So even if I was paid a ludicrous salary I wouldn’t do more than was needed, let alone build something that would drive shareholder value.

  • @joe_archer@lemmy.world
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    561 year ago

    It is probably the most telling demonstration of the terrible state of our current society, that one of the largest corporations on earth, which got where it is today by providing accurate information, is now happy to knowingly provide incorrect, and even dangerous information, in its own name, an not give a flying fuck about it.

    • @Hackworth@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Wikipedia got where it is today by providing accurate information. Google results have always been full of inaccurate information. Sorting through the links for respectable sources just became second nature, then we learned to scroll past ads to start sorting through links. The real issue with misinformation from an AI is that people treat it like it should be some infallible Oracle - a point of view only half-discouraged by marketing with a few warnings about hallucinations. LLMs are amazing, they’re just not infallible. Just like you’d check a Wikipedia source if it seemed suspect, you shouldn’t trust LLM outputs uncritically. /shrug

      • @blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Google providing links to dubious websites is not the same as google directly providing dubious answers to questions.

        Google is generally considered to be a trusted company. If you do a search for some topic, and google spits out a bunch of links, you can generally trust that those links are going to be somehow related to your search - but the information you find there may or may not be reliable. The information is coming from the external website, which often is some unknown untrusted source - so even though google is trusted, we know that the external information we found might not be. The new situation now is that google is directly providing bad information itself. It isn’t linking us to some unknown untrusted source but rather the supposedly trustworthy google themselves are telling us answers to our questions.

        None of this would be a problem if people just didn’t consider google to be trustworthy in the first place.

        • @Hackworth@lemmy.world
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          31 year ago

          I do think Perplexity does a better job. Since it cites sources in its generated response, you can easily check its answer. As to the general public trusting Google, the company’s fall from grace began in 2017, when the EU fined them like 2 billion for fixing search results. There’ve been a steady stream of controversies since then, including the revelation that Chrome continues to track you in private mode. YouTube’s predatory practices are relatively well-known. I guess I’m saying that if this is what finally makes people give up on them, no skin off my back. But I’m disappointed by how much their mismanagement seems to be adding to the pile of negativity surrounding AI.

  • @badbytes@lemmy.world
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    521 year ago

    Step 1. Replace CEO with AI. Step 2. Ask New AI CEO, how to fix. Step 3. Blindly enact and reinforce steps

  • Pumpkin Escobar
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    481 year ago

    Rip up the Reddit contract and don’t use that data to train the model. It’s the definition of a garbage in garbage out problem.

    • SeaJ
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      81 year ago

      Jesus. I didn’t even think of that. I could totally see that being a big part of why it is giving garbage answers.

      • @teejay@lemmy.world
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        251 year ago

        Just imagine the average reddit, twitter, facebook, and instagram content. Then realize that half of that content is dumber than that. That’s half of what these AI models use to learn. The “smarter” half is probably filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and other types of innuendo that the AI at this stage has no chance of understanding correctly.

        • SeaJ
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          151 year ago

          Reminds me of the time Microsoft unleashed their AI Twitter account and it turned into a Nazi after a couple hours. Whatever straight out of business school idiot who thought scraping the comments of the armpit of the internet was a good idea should be banned from any management position. At least it is a step up from scraping 4chan, I guess.

          • @Xatolos@reddthat.com
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            21 year ago

            The Microsoft Tay one I can understand though. Before it was released, they had also had Microsoft Xiaoice which had been in use for 2 years prior without this issue. Yay was just the English version of that.

  • Mad_Punda.de
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    471 year ago

    these hallucinations are an “inherent feature” of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature "is still an unsolved problem”.

    Then what made you think it’s a good idea to include that in your product now?!