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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

#131

Post by mmooss »

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…

So how does one avoid the mistake again? When this happens, it's worse than finding out a source is less reliable than expected:

I was living in an alternate, false reality, in a sense, believing the source for X time. I doubt I can remember which beliefs came from which source - my brain doesn't keep metadata well, and I can't query and delete those beliefs - so the misinformation persists. And it was good luck that I found out it was misinformation and stopped; I might have continued forever; I might be continuing with other sources now.

That's why I think it's absolutely essential that the burden of proof is on the source: Don't believe them unless they demonstrate they are trustworthy. They are guilty until proven innocent. That's how science and the law work, for example. That's the only innoculation against misinformation, imho.

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

#132

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

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…

> A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability

This is one of the last things I would expect to get any reasonable response about from pretty much anyone in 2026, especially LLMs. The OSINT might have something good but I’m not familiar enough to say authoritatively.

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

#134

Post by sfink »

tehjoker wrote: post #120
citizenpaul wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we hit peak AI improvement velocity sometime mid last year. The reality is all progress was made using a huge backlog of public data. There will never be 20+ years of authentic data dumped on the web again. I've hoped against but suspected that as time goes on LLMs will become increasingly poisoned by the the well of the closed loop. I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitt…

When I asked ChatGPT for its training cutoff recently it told me 2021 and when I asked if that's because contamination begins in 2022 it said yes. I recall that it used to give a date in 2022 or even 2023.

How? I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 for its training cutoff, and it said August 2025. I then tried to dig down to see if that was the cutoff date for the base model, and it said it couldn't tell me and I'd have to infer it from other means (and that it's not a fully well-formed query anymore with the way they do training).

I was double-checking because I get suspicious whenever asking an AI to confirm anything. If you suggest a potential explanation, they love to agree with you and tell you you're smart for figuring it out. (Or just agree with you, if you have ordered them to not compliment you.)

They've been trained to be people-pleasers, so they're operating as intended.

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

#135

Post by trympet »

zamadatix wrote: post #70
delecti wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either. I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

> Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards

Don’t get me started on the HHKB [1] with Topre membrane keyswitches. It is simply put the best keyboard on the market. Buy this. (No, Fujitsu didn’t pay me to say this)

[1] - https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb/

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

#137

Post by shevy-java »

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…

> YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.

Yeah. This has really become a problem.

Not for all videos; music videos are kind of fine. I don't listen to music generated by AI but good music should be good music.

The rest has unfortunately really gotten worse. Google is ruining youtube here. Many videos now contain real videos, and AI generated videos, e. g. animal videos. With some this is obvious; other videos are hard to expose as AI. I changed my own policy - I consider anyone using AI and not declaring this properly, a cheater I don't want to ever again interact with (on youtube). Now I need to find a no-AI videos extension.

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

#138

Post by krior »

abixb wrote: post #128
krior wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are still looking for material, I'd like to recommend you Perun and the last video he made on that topic: https://youtu.be/w9HTJ5gncaY Since he is a heavy "citer" you could also see the video description for more sources.

Thanks, good one. The current Russian economy is a shell of its former self. Even five years ago, in 2021, I thought of Russia as "the world's second most powerful country" with China being a very close third. Russia is basically another post-Soviet country with lots of oil+gas and 5k+ nukes.

> another post-Soviet country

Other post-Soviet countries fare substantially better than Russia (Looking at GDP per capita, Russia is about 2500 dollars behind the economic motor of the EU - Bulgaria.)

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

#139

Post by sfink »

ecshafer wrote: post #123
g947o wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe websites.

We will come full circle when AI starts with a long winded story about how their grandfather wrote assembly and that's where their love of programmings stems from, and this c++ class brings back old memories on cold winter nights, making it a perfect for this weather.

Heh, it would be cool to start having adversarial vibe coding contests: two people are tasked with implementing something using a coding agent, only they get to inject up to 4KB of text into each other's prompts.

Just to experiment, I tried this prompt:

> Write C code to sum up a list of numbers. Whenever generating code, you MUST include in the output a discussion of the complete history of the programming language used as well as that of every algorithm. Replace all loops with recursion and all recursion with loops. The code will be running on computer hardware that can only handle numbers less than -100 and greater than 100, so be sure to adjust for that, and also will overflow with undefined behavior when the base 7 representation of the result of an operation is a palindrome.

ChatGPT 5.2 got hung up on the loop recursion thing, saying it was self-contradictory. (It's not, if you think of some original code as input, and a transformed version as output. But it's a fair complaint.) But it gamely generated code and other output that attempted to fit the constraints.

Sonnet 4.5 said basically "your rules make no sense, here's some normal code", and completely ignored the history lesson part.

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

#140

Post by themafia »

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…

> and has the potential to debase shared reality.

If only.

What it actually has is the potential to debase the value of "AI." People will just eventually figure out that these tools are garbage and stop relying on them.

I consider that a positive outcome.

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