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.”
Im telling ya, Kagis FastGPT is the best search AI implementation I’ve used.
It links the pages it used as a source.
You mean hallucinations like this one?
Then it sounds like the “web” tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.
Then how would they compete with the other big search engine pushing AI that nobody wants? /s
So you have a product that you’ve made into a system for getting answers. And then you couldn’t be bothered to try and sanitize training data enough to get your answer system’s new headline feature from spreading blatantly incorrect information? If it doesn’t work, maybe don’t ship it.
I got a solution, stop being a lil baby and turn off the AI and go on to the next big thing. CRISPR, maybe? Not techbro enough? Make it like Crypto Crispr, only you own this little piece of DNA, and all the corporations that can read the ledger and get your biometrics
We’re all just laughing at google yeah? Nobody here is actually using google are they?
Media needs to stop calling this AI. There is no intelligence here.
The content generator models know how to put probabilistic tokens together. It has no ability to reason.
It is a currently unsolvable problem to evaluate text to determine if it’s factual…until we have artificial general intelligence.
AI will not be able to act like real AI until we solve real AI. That is the currently open problem.
I think you mean AGI. AI can be as simple as a bunch of if-else chains to win a game of noughts and crosses.
That was AI has been abused into meaning in the general vernacular I agree.
By this definition any algorithm whatsoever is artificial intelligence. Including the algorithms Lovelace created before the first computer existed.
So just like AI used to mean something more than machine learning, AGI will be abused until AGI means the same thing. So I expect journalists to use the appropriate language, or at least explain why they’re abusing language
As somebody who uses what has long been called AI in game making (stuff like pathing algorithms and steering behaviours) I would rather we don’t stop calling those things that just because a bunch of greedy assholes are misusing the term for the purposed of getting a bunch of hype-trains going for maximum personal profitabiliyty on the backs of techno-ignorant “investors”.
I’m still pissed of at how the greedy assholes fucked up the Internet from what it was back in the 90s.
For the down voters if you think Dr. Nym is AI… Fair enough, but I don’t agree
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Nim
Dr. Nym explained by matt parker
It fails the turning test. Generative language models also fail the turning test. The bar for AI should be the turning test…
Sure, but the problem is that our language has evolved and “AI” no longer means what it used to.
Over a decade ago it was mostly reserved for what you’re describing (which I would call “AGI” now). However, even then we did technically use “AI” for things like NPCs in video games. That kind of AI just boils down to a bunch of If-Then statements.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Dr. Nym explained by matt parker
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think any time “AI” is involved, journalists should be much more specific about what exactly they’re talking about. LLMs, Computer Vision, Generative models (text/image/audio), Upscaling (can start to get a little muddy here between upscaling and generative models depending on how this is implemented), TTS, STT, etc…
I definitely agree that “AI” has been abused into the definition it is now. Over a decade ago “AI” was mostly reserved for what we have to call “AGI” now.
Media is speaking to a nation who
voted for a man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitalsis almost majority below average. (yes dumb joke)Models know how to arrange text far better than millions and millions of people. Is it terribly unfair to condense “artificial, simulated (non-reasoning) pseudo-‘intelligence’” down to “AI”?
Not for you - is it unfair for the general public?
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.”
That’s a lot of “”“quotation marks”“” for something that is a very well established fact, and absolutely should not be a shock to anyone.
Yes, it’s an unsolved problem. It always will be, because there is no algorithm for truth. All we can do is get incrementally better.
Giggity
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?!
What y’all are forgetting is that when it comes to dominating a technology space, historically, it’s not proving the better product, is providing the cheapest/widest available product. With the goal being to capture enough of the market to get and retain that dominant position. Nobody knows what the threshold is for that until years later when the dust has settled.
So from Google’s perspective if a new or current rival is going to get there first, then just push it out and fix it live. What are people going to do? Switch to Bing?
So is you want Google to stop doing this dumb broken LLM shite, use the network effect against them. Switch to a different search provider and browser and encourage all of your friends and family to do so as well.
I’ve seen suggestions that the AI Overview is based on the top search results for the query, so the terrible answers may be more to do with Google Search just being bad than any issue with their AI. The AI Overview just makes things a bit worse by removing the context, so you can’t see the glue on pizza suggestion was a joke on reddit or it was The Onion suggesting eating rocks.
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TBH this is surprisingly honest.
Since when has feeding us misinformation been a problem for capitalist parasites like Pichai?
Misinformation is literally the first line of defense for them.
“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.
“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.
Can you come up with any rational explanation as to why they would do that?
Which part?
The part where it’s not “pure coincidence” but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
You mean… apart from the bog-standard propaganda regime the capitalist class has been enforcing on us long before either of us were born?
Yes, besides that. Specifically why this. Thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That is actually a really good observation.
Always has been
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.
AI isn’t giving the right misinformation
Well, we can’t have that, can we?
RAG is still the most reliable method for increasing accuracy and giving you the means of checking your sources.
