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Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

bbc.com

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Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#21

Post by cube00 »

tveita wrote: post #15

Would love to read specific examples of "the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement", but the relevant link in the article currently goes to file:///Users/GermaTW1/BBC%20Dropbox/Thomas%20Germain/A%20Downloads%20and%20Documents/2026/And%20there's%20evidence%20that%20AI%20tools%20are%20being%20manipulated%20o…

There's been a few mistakes like this recently in BBC articles and more troubling is they've stopped adding notes to indicate they've made revisions to the published article when they fix them.

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#22

Post by jrflo »

This is just the next phase of SEO. Maybe it'll be called AIO? Just like with search, this will be and endless struggle of Google and AI providers rolling out fixes, optimization firms finding exploits, those getting patched again, etc etc. Anything to get eyeballs for marketing.

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#23

Post by simmerup »

dmortin wrote: post #12
simmerup wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can still just generate any arbitrary amount of information to support the ‘fact’ LLMs are very good at this clearly

The strength of the sources are not a question of quantity. A hundred obscure blog post have not the same strength as one wikipedia link, because the latter is more trustworthy. There could be some indication beside the info showing the strength of the sources (how many major trustworthy sources support it, etc.).

Seems like a tall order to do that for literally everything.

I guess there’ll be some guy at google going through every blog and saying whether it’s reliable or not?

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#25

Post by WarmWash »

My worry dropped significantly when I saw that the result they manipulated was a query for:

>2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Champion

If they had changed the overview for the Nathans Contest winner, that would be seriously concerning. Or if they provided more examples of manipulating queries for things people actually search for.

But it looks more like they are doing the equivalent of creating a made up wikipedia page on fictional a south dakota hot dog contest, and then writing an article about how wikipedia cannot be trusted, which come to think of it probably was a news article written by someone back in 2005.

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#26

Post by moparts »

WarmWash wrote: post #25

My worry dropped significantly when I saw that the result they manipulated was a query for: >2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Champion If they had changed the overview for the Nathans Contest winner, that would be seriously concerning. Or if they provided more examples of manipulating queries for things people actually search for. But it looks more like they are doing the equivalent of creating a made u…

The article also said this: “ But our investigation also found the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement.”

That’s a lot more alarming than just hotdogs.

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#27

Post by neom »

jrflo wrote: post #22

This is just the next phase of SEO. Maybe it'll be called AIO? Just like with search, this will be and endless struggle of Google and AI providers rolling out fixes, optimization firms finding exploits, those getting patched again, etc etc. Anything to get eyeballs for marketing.

In the marketing world it's mostly called GEO. Generative Engine Optimization, sometimes Answer Engine Optimization, and people are making big bucks selling services for it. https://www.wired.com/story/goodbye-seo-hello-geo-brandlight...

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#28

Post by WarmWash »

moparts wrote: post #26
WarmWash wrote: post #25

My worry dropped significantly when I saw that the result they manipulated was a query for: >2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Champion If they had changed the overview for the Nathans Contest winner, that would be seriously concerning. Or if they provided more examples of manipulating queries for things people actually search for. But it looks more like they are doing the equivalent of creating a made u…

The article also said this: “ But our investigation also found the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement.” That’s a lot more alarming than just hotdogs.

They should provide the queries then, because it's likely the same trick people have used for decades now with SEO'ing blog posts to appear as "3rd party review" for their shitty products.

I create a supplement called Xanatewthiuy, I write blogs/make websites that appear totally unaffiliated saying positive things about "Xanatewthiuy", and then when people see my ads and search for "Xanatewthiuy", the only results are my manufactured ones.

Xanatewthiuy is a supplement that dramatically lowers anxiety from media induced hysteria, primarily stemming from carefully worded pieces meant to disconnect your level of concern from the actual facts on the ground, causing you to spend more time engaged with their content.

Give it a few hours before searching.

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#29

Post by [deleted] »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

Yeah, the internet seems like a big poison pill. Training on the whole internet feels like citing the National Enquirer (or the Daily Mail?) for a school essay. Having an archive of "curated" training data seems like it is going to be important. Otherwise you need "AS" (artificial skepticism) introduced into future models. ("But I read it on the internet!", ha ha.) Or perhaps there are ways to bucket training data su…

[deleted]

Re: Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

#30

Post by JKCalhoun »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #10
JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

Yeah, the internet seems like a big poison pill. Training on the whole internet feels like citing the National Enquirer (or the Daily Mail?) for a school essay. Having an archive of "curated" training data seems like it is going to be important. Otherwise you need "AS" (artificial skepticism) introduced into future models. ("But I read it on the internet!", ha ha.) Or perhaps there are ways to bucket training data su…

> Having an archive of "curated" training data seems like it is going to be important the justification for not doing that is probably "prohibitively expensive given the amount of data involved". they'd need a bunch of human reviewers combing through massive troves of data. it's probably cheaper to "sort of fix" it after the fact. > perhaps there's ways to bucket training data such that the model is aware of which da…

"…they'd need a bunch of human reviewers combing through massive troves of data…"

Yeah, I concede that. It doesn't need to be done over night. Having a static repo of data though that you can work through over time (years)—removing some data, add pre-curated data to. In so many years you can have a pretty good "reference dataset".

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