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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

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Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#51

Post by ihnorton »

hajile wrote: post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

Even for programming topics, sites like gitmemory routinely rank higher than the original GitHub repos and StackOverflow answers that they are "mirroring", or the mirror page gets full result billing while the original StackOverflow answer only gets a single title line in the "other results from site" format.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#52

Post by quietbritishjim »

pea wrote: post #29

An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.

A recipe is not copyrightable, so if they just directly presented the recipe to you in a convenient format then someone could copy that recipe for their own site (either manually or automatically scaped). By mixing it up annoyingly with a story it becomes copyrighted. If you still have the recipe in a useful format after the story then it would still be possible to manually copy just that part, but at least you've made it harder for someone to scrape it.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #32
cainxinth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.

It would be interested to know how this process looked like. I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps each leading to the next one, and when they finally started to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe even positive.

For one, when they started ads, they were not inline with the search results, and in brightly highlighted boxes. So it was easy to say, you know, we have ads, but they don't affect search results.

Today they say the same thing, but nontechnical users can no longer distinguish ads from their organic search results.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#54

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #35
hajile wrote: post #3

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon. Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get…

I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.

That worked for awhile. But even Reddit has been overrun with coordinated marketing efforts to make sure you can't really get an honest review without checking every comments post history.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#55

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

fouc wrote: post #2

> There are woolly intimations that self driving cars will read roadsigns to work out what the speed limit is for any stretch of road but the truth seems to be that they use the current GPS co-ordinates to access manually entered data on speedlimits. I actually didn't know Tesla cars relied on GPS + map data w/ speed limits until recently. What a disappointment, apparently it causes all sorts of issues with sudden br…

It would be cool if the signs could have a low density error correcting code on them (maybe even only using a paint that can be seen in infrared) that would let the computers have more confidence in what they're seeing.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#56

Post by morelisp »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #32
cainxinth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.

It would be interested to know how this process looked like. I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps each leading to the next one, and when they finally started to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe even positive.

The DoubleClick acquisition was the inflection point, even obviously at the time. Before that AdWords was reasonably in-line with Google's standards and culture.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#57

Post by mxcrossb »

pea wrote: post #29

An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.

I only go to Allrecipes now for exactly this reason. It’s funny, people used to mock that site for the stupid reviews, but what matters can quickly change...

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#58

Post by svachalek »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #46
cainxinth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.

Which would one? 1. One search engine w/ hundreds of thousands of employeers & bajillions in revenue 2. One search engine w/ like 3 people & a chonky Patreon account

That’s a bit of a false dichotomy though. Although the original AdWords also made them an adverting based search engine, it made them massively profitable without violating anyone’s privacy.

It was the need to make even more billions that led them down the slippery slope of mass surveillance that makes everyone uneasy now.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#59

Post by bena »

pea wrote: post #29

An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.

I think part of this is that recipes themselves are not protected under copyright. They fall under the provision of factual information.

1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, 1 cup of milk, 2 tbsp of sugar, mix until smooth is a shitty pancake recipe (I think, it's close), but there aren't many ways to say that that makes it novel. Recipes are essentially instruction on how to build food.

Where copyright comes into play for cookbooks and recipe sites are presentation. And that includes the stories. So while the recipe itself doesn't enjoy copyright protection, writing "In the early autumn morning, my grandmother enjoyed making the family the most delicious pancakes, she started by going out to the chicken coop and sticking her whole hand up a chicken's ass to get only the freshest eggs possible..."

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#60

Post by Tarsul »

I really like the expression "metadata analysis". It's very succinct, describes very much what AI/ML often boils down to in 2 (rather) simple words. I will try to remember this. The marketing guys in cooperation with journalists won the battle for now but words will be replaced by others again and again and even change their meaning, so maybe next time the shiny new technology will get more adequate wording? (well, maybe not in these times where clickbait wins it all)
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