Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

readtpa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 135 posts

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#101

Post by __loam »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #33
_air wrote: post #19

Is Google losing significant web traffic to ChatGPT and others? I don't understand why else they'd test a product like this so widely.

If they had any sense at all (questionable) they would be absolutely pants-shittingly terrified that their prized product has been completely undercut by an upstart in a matter of months, and that Microsoft has a deep partnership with that competitor. I'd think even the leadership at Google can figure out that ChatGPT eats their lunch in terms of cutting through the SEO bullshit and giving actual information. If they…

Completely is a wild overstatement of what OpenAI has done to Google. There was an article on hackernews a few weeks ago about the actual trends that showed GPT had barely scratched Google's share of traffic and that OpenAI was hemorrhaging users after the initial sign up.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#102

Post by [deleted] »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #78
jsheard wrote: post #6

If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea. edit: screenshots for posterity https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502

Google's AI went from far-left to far-right in like a month.

[deleted]

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#103

Post by shooker435 »

mike_d wrote: post #100
shooker435 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's strictly the recruiting pool that made things break down, but I see it more as a result of COVID/WFH + the recruiting pool. Google's strong in-office culture once helped new joiners learn the culture and challenge others in a respectful way - now it's a political minefield. Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline. If you've been there a while, you'll notice the wild…

> Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline. Absolutely agree. A lot of the top talent bailed when they started demanding return to office. Google played the "if you don't X we will fire you" with a bunch of L7+ that ... surprise, could easily get jobs elsewhere or had enough GSUs to flat out retire.

Yeah, I left to start my own company (which I was already contemplating) but some of the changes in early 2023 were the catalyst that I needed to make the jump. I made sure to give the best feedback that I could in my exit interview, but I doubt it has much of an impact at a company that large.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#104

Post by balder1991 »

rovr138 wrote: post #99
balder1991 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the websites remaining will be genuinely interesting texts that you’d actually want to read instead of just query for an answer.

Sure, things like blogs. But if you need info for a movie or something, where will the data come from? Back to newspapers?

I would imagine Google doing something like: “just use this service to keep your information up to date and you’ll get monetized automatically based on users querying your data”.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#105

Post by pylua »

rovr138 wrote: post #97
pylua wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like eventually, it would become the dominant predator, and deplete its food supply?

With these companies crawling the internet, it’ll be a race to create content. Then reuse the models to generate more, new content for your website It’ll be diminishing returns for visitors

Worse than that is that it will diminish the desire to create.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#106

Post by rovr138 »

balder1991 wrote: post #104
rovr138 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, things like blogs. But if you need info for a movie or something, where will the data come from? Back to newspapers?

I would imagine Google doing something like: “just use this service to keep your information up to date and you’ll get monetized automatically based on users querying your data”.

Right now they have us convinced to optimize how we give them data for them to be able to parse it (schema.org, etc). So we give them the data, optimize it for them ingesting it, then we loose traffic because people get the data on the search page.

We'll probably have to pay them to give them the data...

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#107

Post by balder1991 »

rovr138 wrote: post #106
balder1991 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine Google doing something like: “just use this service to keep your information up to date and you’ll get monetized automatically based on users querying your data”.

Right now they have us convinced to optimize how we give them data for them to be able to parse it (schema.org, etc). So we give them the data, optimize it for them ingesting it, then we loose traffic because people get the data on the search page. We'll probably have to pay them to give them the data...

Yeah, but thinking about it now, this happens because Google has a monopoly on search and they can afford to dictate the rules. I think that with more companies competing with AI the field is a bit more even, and Google would be the one needing this kind of “advantage”.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#108

Post by euW3EeBe »

jjulius wrote: post #13
jsheard wrote: post #6

If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea. edit: screenshots for posterity https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502

Uhh, not quite true. I just asked it, and it said... > The United States has not had any presidents who have publicly identified as Muslim. The vast majority of presidents have been Christian, with most belonging to Protestant denominations. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office, so a Muslim (or person of any faith) can certainly become president in the future.

When I looked this up it pointed me to this exact comment.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#109

Post by skynetv2 »

Google used to show me sarcastic articles as news stories in my Google feed and Google news. It became so bad from me clicking on articles about a specific industry, reading and realizing they are sarcastic, and Google sending me more articles that were largely sarcastic. These were stories from sites like The Onion.

I filed a bug, and gave a lot of detail and linked to screenshots of my feed, News page and identified all the news stores that were not news. They closed the bug saying it was not a bug. I tried convincing them that this is a problem. They denied. I got frustrated and just blocked the domains. Its almost laughable the AI search is suffering from the same issue.

Re: Google's AI-generated search results keep citing The Onion

#110

Post by senectus1 »

imho all Ai should be forced to show their level of confidence in what they say. (also cite sources) Any Ai that LIES about the level of confidence will get fined/removed.

There are many exampled of Ai that "hallucinates" in really obvious ways. that makes them Lies not hallucinations.

Post reply on HN