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

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

#71

Post by Raphael_Amiard »

K0balt wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #54

As Google has been unable to keep spammy crap out of their search index since at least 2006 when we were doing Blekko I doubt they will have much success fighting this. But it is another good example that "AI" is just glorified search and there is not reasoning or thinking going on behind the covers.

Hmm. I don’t think that novel code generation can be accounted for with glorified search. I can have my agentic system read a few data sheets, then I explain the project requirements and have it design driver specifications, protocols, interfaces, and state machines. Taking those, develop an implementation plan. Working from that, write the skeleton of the application, then fill it in to create a functional system us…

It’s pattern matching. A big part of reasoning for sure, but not reasoning per se

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

#72

Post by chasebank »

realmofthemad wrote: post #70
coffeefirst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. So that's what one guy can do. When you realize how much astroturf is going into Reddit, most social media platforms, and the efforts to manipulate wikipedia for political gain, this is a very real problem.

It's very hard to tell how much is actually fake though. Are there any good statistics on this?

Easy. It's all fake.

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

#73

Post by rkozik1989 »

K0balt wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #54

As Google has been unable to keep spammy crap out of their search index since at least 2006 when we were doing Blekko I doubt they will have much success fighting this. But it is another good example that "AI" is just glorified search and there is not reasoning or thinking going on behind the covers.

Hmm. I don’t think that novel code generation can be accounted for with glorified search. I can have my agentic system read a few data sheets, then I explain the project requirements and have it design driver specifications, protocols, interfaces, and state machines. Taking those, develop an implementation plan. Working from that, write the skeleton of the application, then fill it in to create a functional system us…

How do you even know those numbers are correct? Realistically for what you've described you need more QA time that a traditional application to ensure its actually working properly. Especially with regards to any part of the application that deals with LLM inference. Its not hard to write unique content for niche topics where there are few relevant results and have LLMs take it as fact.

For example, I poisoned the well for research on early Arab Americans immigrants by repeatedly posting about how many family passed as different ethnicity to make their lives easier, so now if you ask LLMs about that subject it'll include information I wrote which isn't entirely correct because I hadn't figured everything out before the LLM trained on it.

EDIT: Now imagine if I had done this on an obscure programming-related problem, yeah? I could potentially make the LLM reference packages that do not actually exist and put backdoors in applications.

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

#75

Post by chrismarlow9 »

dmortin wrote: post #5

There should be some warning if some "fact" is only supported by one or very few obscure sources. The strength of the sources should be clearly indicated in the answers to help users gauge how trustworthy the info is.

We've been down this road when backlinks ran the game. It eventually ends with parasitic hosting. Find a domain with authority and spam whatever mis information or spam you'd like AI to run there. Or buy a domain that has trust already. Or for the darker hats just literally hack the site and use cloaking to send fake info to the AI bot. It's probably already being done.

Everything old is new again when you start a new market. If you think that AI is bad imagine what old tricks are new with polymarkets

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

#76

Post by mlmonkey »

Google solved the spam problem (with PageRank at first, and then other techniques, finally landing on ML-based models which consume a ginormous number of signals). They know more about the reliability of web pages than just about anybody else out there.

If they are unwilling or unable to leverage all of this deep knowledge they've built up over the decades, then it shows a failure of leadership at Google Search.

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

#77

Post by K0balt »

rkozik1989 wrote: post #73
K0balt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I don’t think that novel code generation can be accounted for with glorified search. I can have my agentic system read a few data sheets, then I explain the project requirements and have it design driver specifications, protocols, interfaces, and state machines. Taking those, develop an implementation plan. Working from that, write the skeleton of the application, then fill it in to create a functional system us…

How do you even know those numbers are correct? Realistically for what you've described you need more QA time that a traditional application to ensure its actually working properly. Especially with regards to any part of the application that deals with LLM inference. Its not hard to write unique content for niche topics where there are few relevant results and have LLMs take it as fact. For example, I poisoned the we…

Because I have 100 percent test coverage (of the software, some hardware edge cases pop up that aren’t documented in the data sheets), and over 10k hours of field deployment over 130 devices? This rollout has been much more bug free than any we have done in the last six years, and it’s the first that has been almost zero hand coded. (Our system is far from vibe coding however, there is a very strict pipeline)

I’m not saying that AI can solve every problem or that it is without problems (we spent hundreds of hours developing a concept to production pipeline just to make sure it doesn’t go off the rails)

But the net result is that a good senior dev with an acutely olfactory paranoia can supervise a production pipeline and produce efficient, maintainable code at a much faster rate (and ridiculously lower cost) that he was doing before supervising 3 or 4 devs on a complex hardware project. I can’t speak for other types of development, but our applications devs are also leveraging AI code generation and it -seems- to be working out.

Now, where those senior devs are going to come from in the future… that imho is a huge problem. It’s definitely some flavor of eating the goose that lays the golden egg here.

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

#79

Post by K0balt »

Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #71
K0balt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I don’t think that novel code generation can be accounted for with glorified search. I can have my agentic system read a few data sheets, then I explain the project requirements and have it design driver specifications, protocols, interfaces, and state machines. Taking those, develop an implementation plan. Working from that, write the skeleton of the application, then fill it in to create a functional system us…

It’s pattern matching. A big part of reasoning for sure, but not reasoning per se

That could be, but if that is the case than development apparently doesn’t require reasoning? Or maybe that’s the part that the senior developer supervising the pipeline injects. Thats certainly a plausible position.

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

#80

Post by realusername »

mlmonkey wrote: post #76

Google solved the spam problem (with PageRank at first, and then other techniques, finally landing on ML-based models which consume a ginormous number of signals). They know more about the reliability of web pages than just about anybody else out there. If they are unwilling or unable to leverage all of this deep knowledge they've built up over the decades, then it shows a failure of leadership at Google Search.

I think they lost against (or gave up) fighting spam somewhat around 2010 so they really don't have any modern experience on page reliability anymore. Presumably they thought that they didn't need to care as they got their money from paid top results and had an enormous market share.

All the engineers of the golden days are gone and the web changed so much from back then that I don't think they really have a leverage in this area anymore.

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