Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 214 posts

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

#41

Post by jeffbee »

ffsm8 wrote: post #37
jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are being dismissive, though. There is no "original knowledge" anywhere. If the videos are the best presentation of the information, best suited to convey the topic to the audience, then that is valuable. Humans learn better from visual information conveyed at the same time as spoken language, because that exploits multiple independent brain functions at the same time. Reading does not have this property. Particularly for novices to a topic, videos can more easily convey the mental framework necessary for deeper understanding than text can. Experts will prefer the text, but they are rarer.

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

#42

Post by alex1138 »

hobs wrote: post #40
alex1138 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 vaccin…

Unfortunately it's not disinformation, it's going to be a while for people to discover how many things they were lied to about

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

#43

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

gumboshoes wrote: post #30
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…

How is any non-expert supposed to judge the content without some kind of guide like say credentials? Credentials do matter when the author is unknown.

Separating credentialed but bad faith covid grift from evolving legitimate medical advice based on the best information available at the time did not require anything but common sense and freedom from control by demagoguery.

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

#44

Post by heliumtera »

Ohhh, I would make one wild guess: in the upcoming llm world, the highest bidder will have a higher chance of appearing as a citation or suggestion! Welcome to gas town, so much productivity ahead!! For you and the high bidding players interested in taking advantage of you

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

#45

Post by hobs »

alex1138 wrote: post #42
hobs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vaccin…

Unfortunately it's not disinformation, it's going to be a while for people to discover how many things they were lied to about

https://www.wpr.org/health/health-experts-officials-slam-ron...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence instead of just posting bs on rumble.

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

#46

Post by delecti »

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…

All of that and you're still a heavy user? Why would google change how Gemini works if you keep using it despite those issues?

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

#49

Post by fc417fc802 »

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.

I don't think anyone is talking about "medical sites" but rather medical sites. Indeed "medical sites" are no better than unvetted youtube videos created by "experts".

That said, if (hypothetically) gemini were citing only videos posted by professional physicians or perhaps videos uploaded to the channel of a medical school that would be fine. The present situation is similar to an LLM generating lots of citations to vixra.

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

#50

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jeffbee wrote: post #41
ffsm8 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are being dismissive, though. There is no "original knowledge" anywhere. If the videos are the best presentation of the information, best suited to convey the topic to the audience, then that is valuable. Humans learn better from visual information conveyed at the same time as spoken language, because that exploits multiple independent brain functions at the same time. Reading does not have this property. Particu…

> If the videos are the best presentation of the information, best suited to convey the topic to the audience, then that is valuable

Still doesn’t make them a primary source. A good research agent should be able to jump off the video to a good source.

Post reply on HN