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Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

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Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#11

Post by lame-robot-hoax »

ulrashida wrote: post #7
blakesterz wrote: post #5

Everytime I see someone finding something wrong about these things, I am reminded of Stoll in '95 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... He also had some similar things in Cuckoo's Egg. I wish I could find the quotes, but there was something about email not working all the time and therefor pointless to use. I'm glad people are finding all the flaws in ChatGPT and the LLM things now, but won'…

However, Stoll was largely correct: the web is not Nirvana. Some structures persisted (e.g. Wikipedia) to help round off data correctness, albeit imperfectly, but his central concerns are just as valid today as they were in 1995. As a user, the ability for a LLM to literally make things up and present them alongside other true data with no qualms or disclaimers is highly detrimental to the central use case.

He was correct about some things, but also largely incorrect as well.

> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Telecommuting workers is reality. Interactive libraries are a reality. Multimedia classrooms have been a reality for over a decade. Electronic town meetings, maybe not, but virtual communities? Very much a reality. Malls are dead and brick and mortar has been hurt extensively by Amazon. Offices lay empty due to remote work.

Newspapers are largely dead, at the very least compared to what they once were. There is plenty of online learning, largely without in person learning. Computer networks have definitely changed how the government works.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#12

Post by fortyseven »

michaericalribo wrote: post #3

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes tu…

Ever since Google started adding those quick answer boxes at the top of search results I've had the double check everything they say. They're quite often incorrect. I mean I know that, but this grandma? They've all been conditioned to trust Google.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#13

Post by partiallypro »

DeRock wrote: post #9

I asked the same question to chatGPT, and it gave only future-looking statements, I guess because it was only trained on pre-JWST-launch data. PROMPT: what new discoveries from the James Webb Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about? ANSWER: > Here are a few things that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might discover that you could explain to a 9-year-old: > Planets around other stars: JWST will be able to study…

But ChatGPT just doesn't have this information available to it, as its data stops before it was fully launched. You can ask it about the invasion of Ukraine and it's completely oblivious to any major recent incident, it just will keep talking about 2014.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#15

Post by [deleted] »

DeRock wrote: post #9

I asked the same question to chatGPT, and it gave only future-looking statements, I guess because it was only trained on pre-JWST-launch data. PROMPT: what new discoveries from the James Webb Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about? ANSWER: > Here are a few things that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might discover that you could explain to a 9-year-old: > Planets around other stars: JWST will be able to study…

[deleted]

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#16

Post by brookst »

michaericalribo wrote: post #3

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes tu…

Disagree. I think this is akin to Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, which relied on the insight that it is impossible to build infallible systems, so you design failure and recovery in.

Existing Google searches are polluted with false information, and Google’s has been losing that battle. It’s probably not even possible to win.

So rather than saying search engines should always be perfectly accurate and errors are catastrophic, we should accept that search engines are, and have always been imperfect, and need to give us enough info to validate facts for queries important enough to merit it.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#17

Post by timidger »

blakesterz wrote: post #5

Everytime I see someone finding something wrong about these things, I am reminded of Stoll in '95 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... He also had some similar things in Cuckoo's Egg. I wish I could find the quotes, but there was something about email not working all the time and therefor pointless to use. I'm glad people are finding all the flaws in ChatGPT and the LLM things now, but won'…

I have no doubt these technologies will improve, but there's another argument to be made. The tech will get better and we'll be all the worse for it.

Stoll argued the tech will not be good enough, but paid little thought to the ramifications of the technology succeeding. The arguments against LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT that I have seen are assuming they'll be successful.

They'll become less stupid, but the problem is not that they are wrong but that they are, at present at least, unassailable. You cannot fact check through most of the normal means. You can not research the publication or the author or the date the words were written because that has all been stripped away.

You could check other sources (eg old fashion google) and put in the leg work, but as these get better that will feel less necessary - potentially exacerbating this problem.

That's not to say they aren't useful. I used Chat gpt the other day to get some work done and was impressed. However this was work easily verifiable because it was technical and had immediate feedback when the ai inevitably gave me slightly incorrect code. The same can not be said for facts, figures, and arguments of thought.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#18

Post by partiallypro »

I think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left behind or one upped by Microsoft. There is also a fear, I think, that the ChatGPT integration with Bing/Edge could not go all that smoothly. I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart.

Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch, the press loved them...but now they are not nearly as valuable as they were touted (and actually lose these companies money.) Convenient, but not game changing. I think it's a waiting game to see what this truly does.

I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#19

Post by nicbou »

michaericalribo wrote: post #3

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes tu…

The content I write is often half-assedly plagiarised by copywriters or incorrectly interpreted by lazy journalists. This is just an automated version of it. They can use my hard work for their own profit at an unprecedented pace, while still remaining factually incorrect.

Re: Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad

#20

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

mort96 wrote: post #10
michaericalribo wrote: post #3

This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes tu…

We fact check search engine results all the time. But most of the time, such fact checking is in the form of looking at a result, considering whether it seems like a credible source, seeing if multiple credible-seeming results have the same answer, etc. Getting a completely untrustworthy, unsourced response seems worse than useless. Google has been going this way for a while, with its instant answers or whatever, but…

We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

A few sources will control the information we get in a much more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from now.

If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational search results distracting us, we'd never tolerate that in principle.

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