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.”

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    31 year ago

    Im telling ya, Kagis FastGPT is the best search AI implementation I’ve used.

    It links the pages it used as a source.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    251 year ago

    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.

    • SeaJ
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 year ago

      Then how would they compete with the other big search engine pushing AI that nobody wants? /s

  • Metype
    link
    fedilink
    English
    261 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    121 year ago

    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

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    591 year ago

    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.

    • JackGreenEarth
      link
      fedilink
      English
      151 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        131 year ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          31 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          31 year ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      Media is speaking to a nation who voted for a man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals is 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?

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    211 year ago

    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.

  • Mad_Punda.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    521 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?!

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    151 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    101 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    861 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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 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.

    • RubberDuck
      link
      fedilink
      English
      341 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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        111 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.

        • RubberDuck
          link
          fedilink
          English
          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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          3
          edit-2
          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?

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        61 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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      4
      edit-2
      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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11 year ago

    RAG is still the most reliable method for increasing accuracy and giving you the means of checking your sources.