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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

theguardian.com

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Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#31

Post by ceejayoz »

raincole wrote: post #22
ceejayoz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day. A professor in the field can probably go "ok this video is bullshit" a couple minutes in if it's wrong. They can identify a bad surgeon, a dangerous technique, or an edge case that may not be covered. You and I cannot. Basically, the same problem the general public has with phishing,…

The same can be said for average "medical sites" the Google search gives you anyway.

It's a lot easier for me to assess the Mayo Clinic's website being legitimate than an individual YouTuber's channel.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#32

Post by ceejayoz »

laborcontract wrote: post #23
ceejayoz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day. A professor in the field can probably go "ok this video is bullshit" a couple minutes in if it's wrong. They can identify a bad surgeon, a dangerous technique, or an edge case that may not be covered. You and I cannot. Basically, the same problem the general public has with phishing,…

Your comment doesn't address my point. The same criticism applies to any medium.

The point is you can't say "an expert finds x useful in their field y" and expect it to always mean "any random idiot will find x useful in field y".

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#33

Post by jeffbee »

gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#34

Post by gowld »

jdlyga wrote: post #8

It's tough convincing people that Google AI overviews are often very wrong. People think that if it's displayed so prominently on Google, it must be factually accurate right? "AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more" It's not mistakes, half the time it's completely wrong and total bullshit information. Even comparing it to other AI, if you put the same question into GPT 5.2 or Gemini, you get much more accurate…

That's because decent (but still flawed) GenAI is expensive. The AI Overview model is even cheaper than the AI Mode model, which is cheaper than the Gemini free model, which is cheaper than the Gemini Thinking model, which is cheaer than the Gemini Pro model, which is still very misleading when working on human language source content. (It's much better at math and code).

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#35

Post by jeffbee »

quantumwoke wrote: post #16

It's crazy to me that somewhere along the way we lost physical media as a reference point. Journals and YouTube can be good sources of information, but unless heavily confined to high quality information current AI is not able to judge citation quality to come up with good recommendations. The synthesis of real world medical experience is often collated in medical textbooks and yet AI doesn't cite them nearly as much…

The vast majority of journal articles are not available freely to the public. A second problem is that the business of scientific journals has destroyed itself by massive proliferation of lower quality journals with misleading names, slapdash peer review, and the crisis of quiet retractions.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#36

Post by panki27 »

abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

Ourobouros - The mythical snake that eats its own tail (and ingests its own excrement)

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#37

Post by ffsm8 »

jeffbee wrote: post #33
gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

YouTube has almost no original knowledge.

Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions.

I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#38

Post by no_wizard »

abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

>Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

This itself seems pretty damning of these AI systems from a narrative point of view, if we take it at face value.

You can't trust AI to generate things that are sufficiently grounded in facts that you can't even use it as a reference point. Why should end users believe the narrative that these things are as capable as they're being told they are, by extension?

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#39

Post by lm28469 »

abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

> Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source

Almost every time for me... an AI generated video, with AI voiceover, AI generated images, always with < 300 views

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#40

Post by hobs »

alex1138 wrote: post #27
sofixa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, you mean like removing scores of covid videos from real doctors and scientists which were deemed to be misinformation The credentials don't matter, the actual content does. And if it's misinformation, then yes, you can be a quadruple doctor, it's still misinformation. In France, there was a real doctor, epidemiologist, who became famous because he was pushing a cure for Covid. He did some underground, barely le…

[flagged]

You mean people like this - The COVID vaccine “has been proven to have negative efficacy.”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jun/07/ron-johnso...

This is called disinformation that will get you killed, so yeah, probably not good to have on youtube.

- After saying he was attacked for claiming that natural immunity from infection would be "stronger" than the vaccine, Johnson threw in a new argument. The vaccine "has been proven to have negative efficacy," he said. -

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