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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

#141

Post by NewsaHackO »

xnx wrote: post #7

Sounds very misleading. Web pages come from many sources, but most video is hosted on YouTube. Those YouTube videos may still be from Mayo clinic. It's like saying most medical information comes from Apache, Nginx, or IIS.

Yea, clearly this is the case. Also, as there isn't a clearly defined public-facing medical knowledge source, every institution/school/hospital system would be split from each other even further. I suspect that if one compared the aggregate of all reliable medical sources, it would be higher than youtube by a considerable margin. Also, since this search was done with German-language queries, I suspect this would reduce the chances of reputable English sources being quoted even further.

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

#142

Post by AznHisoka »

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.

Rule of thumb: never ask chatgpt about its inner working. It will lie or fabricate something. It will probably say something completely different next time

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

#144

Post by gretch »

themafia wrote: post #140
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.

Every other source for information, including (or maybe especially) human experts can also make mistakes or hallucinate.

The reason ppl go to LLMs for medical advice is because real doctors actually fuck up each and everyday.

For clear, objective examples look up stories where surgeons leave things inside of patient bodies post op.

Here’s one, and there many like it.

https://abc13.com/amp/post/hospital-fined-after-surgeon-leav...

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

#145

Post by Aurornis »

jppope wrote: post #143

Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?

Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall where testing combined with years of clinical experience are needed to evaluate something.

A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has started trying to fill this void by providing seemingly more definitive answers to vague inputs. There's a lot of content that exists to basically confirm what the viewer wants to hear, not tell them that their doctor is a better judge than they are.

This is happening everywhere on social media. See the explosion in content dedicated to telling people that every little thing is a symptom of ADHD or that being a little socially awkward or having unusual interests is a reliable indicator for Autism.

There's a growing problem in the medical field where patients show up to the clinic having watched hundreds of hours of TikTok and YouTube videos and having already self-diagnosing themselves with multiple conditions. Talking them out of their conclusions can be really hard when the provider only has 40 minutes but the patient has a parasocial relationship with 10 different influencers who speak to them every day through videos.

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

#146

Post by Aurornis »

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.

I'm not looking for original knowledge when I go to YouTube to learn something. I just want someone who's good at explaining a math concept or who has managed to get the footage I want to see about how something is done.

I think that's the wrong metric for evaluating videos.

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

#147

Post by AlienRobot »

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…

My favorite part of the AI overview is when it says "X is Y (20 sources)" and you click on the sources and Ctrl+F "X is Y" and none of them seem verbatim what the AI is saying they said so you're left wondering if the AI just made it up completely or it paraphrased something that is actually written in one of the sources.

If only we had the technology to display verbatim the text from a webpage in another webpage.

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

#148

Post by GorbachevyChase »

alex1138 wrote: post #114
titzer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will mouth words, but their bottom line runs the show. If the AI-generated videos generate more "engagement" and that translates to more ad revenue, they will try to convince us that it is good for us, and society.

Isn't it cute when they do these things while demonetizing legitimate channels?

Don’t be evil

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

#149

Post by rvnx »

krior wrote: post #138
abixb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Must be a misunderstanding

1) Post-soviet countries are doing amazingly well (Poland, Baltics, etc) and very fast growing + healthy (low criminality, etc)

2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.

3) China is not a country lagging behind others at all. It is said in some schoolbooks but it is a big lie that is 0% true now.

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

#150

Post by GorbachevyChase »

adrian_b wrote: post #57
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.

YouTube has a lot of junk, but there are also a lot of useful videos that demonstrate various practical skills or the experiences of using certain products, or recordings of certain natural environments, which are original, in the sense that before YouTube you could not find equivalent content anywhere, except by knowing personally people who could show you such things, but there would have been very small chances to…

This is basically my only use for YouTube. “How do I frame my carport” and such where visuals are crucial to understanding. But commentary or plain narrative? It’s painful.
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