Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

Having these kind of anti-news sites appear as "news" on Google is not just poisoning their reputation but making them complicit in whatever disaster finally results from it. The worst case scenario is genocide e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

But if you need to replicate google, you need bootloads of user data and in generally data to operate on ( i.e. to be able to extract the equivalence of certain terms and expressions, and so on ). And generally some kind of feedback system ( like user clicking a link on a SERP, is adding that question/answer combo a certain boost for the future ).

In short: it's complicated and after 10 years of experience I couldn't tell if a solution is so unversal as google.

And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI.

> Prepending that is a very bad workaround

I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message"). We rely on the context where the knowledge came from as a proxy for how accurate its content might be.

The default posture of engineers to a problem of inaccuracy is "make it more accurate". That's the logical method when you're building bridges, where we can describe the physics to an extremely accurate degree and where it would fall out or quickly degrade if you make a mistake.

But for problems that rely on inaccurate or uncertain information, and where no exact models exists, the only reasonable way to build them is to degrade gracefully. If you don't handle failures, it will fail in spectacular ways - because it will fail sometimes.

The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control. The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result, and be able to override the given results in those cases where it will get it wrong (at least by some users in a supervising role, which other users could notify to).

Unless a revolution happens, Artificial Intelligence will only ever work in the large if we put humans in the decision loop.

They can't pull that off anymore.

There needs to be a shift towards a Web-of-Trust-like system, where some sources are recognized as authoritative. Government websites, like the CDC, for example. Big media outlets. Scientific associations (IPCC, APA, etc). Not all information is equal. Even if, for example, government dietary recommendations are outdated in some ways, that should be the authoritative answer Google provides, unless there is an equally-reputable but more accurate source (here, prioritize medical sources over governmental ones).

A high school dropout doesn't know more about academic subjects than a PhD grad. A blog isn't as authoritative as a reputable source. This is easy stuff.

Then the question becomes: "some people don't see reputable sources as reputable". That isn't Google's problem, and it can't be fixed at their level.