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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

#121

Post by simonw »

yubblegum wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: post #34

If you ask Google "what's the name of the whale in half moon bay harbor?" it still confidently includes Teresa T in the AI summary, thanks to my frankly amateur attempt at index poisoning from a year and a half ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/teresa-t-whale-pillar-p...

I just tried brave search: -- The name of the young humpback whale that made headlines for swimming into Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay in September 2024 is Teresa T. While the whale was not officially named by government agencies, the moniker "Teresa T" was widely adopted by the public, local media, and residents who followed her stay in the harbor. Experts from the Marine Mammal Center and the California Acad…

> the moniker "Teresa T" was widely adopted by the public, local media, and residents who followed her stay in the harbor

Hah! Yeah, it was me and only me.

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

#122

Post by amarant »

Apocryphon wrote: post #106
ChuckMcM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. I've added it to my list of things when talking about the limitations of LLM.

Perhaps the end state is going to be from the last Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, Mostly Harmless : > Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it with the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwi…

Damn I had forgotten about this section of the book to the point that even reading it, I only recognised the style as typical Adams.

Guess that means I'm overdue for a re-read! Jaay!

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

#123

Post by foxglacier »

suburban_strike wrote: post #113
foxglacier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same attitude as "cheap airfares caused too many tourists which ruined my favorite tourist destination". You're unhappy that more people have access to it and wish it was still exclusive to the small group you conveniently belong to. Capitalism is what made the internet available to the general public.

> You're unhappy that more people have access to it and wish it was still exclusive to the small group you conveniently belong to. This is not an argument made in good faith. It's a strawman you've stuffed with suggestive language to make them look petty and intolerant.

They did look petty and intolerant. The explosion of popularity of the internet in the late 1990's was done by capitalism. Only a few privileged people had access to the pre-capitalism academic internet. Additional capitalism also made it interesting to the little people so that it's the hugely popular thing it is today.

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

#125

Post by Silamoth »

RC_ITR wrote: post #119
keeda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is another good example that "AI" is just glorified search and there is not reasoning or thinking going on behind the covers. I don't think that follows. This is just LLMs being, for a lack of a better word, "gullible." How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet? People fall for spam and scams all the time, doesn't mean they are just glorified searches ;-) It does highligh…

You and OP are both unnecessarily diminishing what 'glorified search' is. If you had told me that in 2015, we would have a tool that can iteratively search the world's best and largest unstructured database and synthesize outputs in language (any natural and structured language), I would have said that is basically AGI. This whole desire for it to 'reason' (autonomously prime its search with a few thousand token) and…

If that’s really the case, then I’d say 2015 you needed to do more reading and thinking about AGI and the nature of intelligence and consciousness. The Chinese Room thought experiment is a good starting point for thinking deeper about what AGI is.

But really, I have trouble grasping how anyone can really think database searching is intelligence. For starters, I’d say the capacity to learn on the fly with relatively poor input data is a necessary condition for intelligence, and you can’t get that with database search.

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

#126

Post by WarmWash »

xp84 wrote: post #115
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…

Okay, but it's easy to make up a novel specific claim no one has written about before, then to make that claim and point to the AI as proof you aren't making this up. For example, imagine this blogpost: --- "San Francisco Mayor Goodway Admits Poisoning Drinking Water with Drugs to Influence Election" May 20th, 2026 "Mayor Goodway admitted on Tuesday that she and her deputies poisoned drinking water across the City in…

Yeah, but this has been true of Google for over 20 years now.

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

#127

Post by danudey »

thewebguyd wrote: post #90
keeda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is another good example that "AI" is just glorified search and there is not reasoning or thinking going on behind the covers. I don't think that follows. This is just LLMs being, for a lack of a better word, "gullible." How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet? People fall for spam and scams all the time, doesn't mean they are just glorified searches ;-) It does highligh…

The problem with the news is who makes the decision on which outlets should be blindly trusted by the LLMs and which shouldn't? It also opens the door to government overreach, say a mandate that says LLMs must use fox news as a source of verified, vetted information. Barring that, we are still relying on the execs at the model companies to pick and choose news outlets, and they have their own biases.

Simplest path to the most generally reliable results:

* Trust consensus across publicly-funded news outlets from outside of the US the most

* Then consensus across private news agencies from outside of the US (across countries)

* Then individual trust from publicly-funded news outlets, then private

* Then multinational non-profit advocacy groups based outside of the US

* Then public broadcasters in the US

* Then local news agencies inside the US when the topic is relevant to local news

* Then national news agencies inside the US

All facetiousness aside, the idea should be to analyze consensus across multiple sources with different biases and agendas. Don't trust any one story from any one source, but look for multiple stories from multiple sources and synthesize results from that. Where they disagree, note it in the output. If they have a source, go analyze the source rather than taking their interpretation at face value.

Even if I thought that CNN was a thousand times more reliable than Fox News, CNN could still make mistakes, either factually or editorially and repeating those mistakes can still be damaging even if they weren't intentional or malicious.

If the Washington Post and Fox News agree on something, that doesn't mean it's more likely to be correct. If The Guardian and Die Welt agree on something, that's a more reliable signal. If CBC News and Fox News agree on something, that's a strong signal.

Also worth a read: countries with public broadcasters have healthier democracies: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/do-countries-with-better-f...

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

#128

Post by Silamoth »

freejazz wrote: post #97
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…

>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 using a novel combination of hardware. When you put it that way, isn't it crazy you have to…

This is exactly it. A human capable of reasoning might not know how to write code. But they can learn and be taught. Eventually, you can give them a vague problem, and they’ll know what clarifying questions to ask and how to write the code. LLMs cannot do that.

If you have to do the reasoning and tell the LLM the results of your reasoning before it can generate the code you want, surely that tells you the LLM isn’t reasoning. Agentic workflows hide some of it, but anyone who’s interacted even a little with an LLM can tell they’re not reasoning, no matter how OpenAI and Anthropic label their models.

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

#129

Post by brandonwindson »

realusername wrote: post #80
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…

Google stopped fighting spam when they realized paid ads made more money than organic relevance

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

#130

Post by K0balt »

ACCount37 wrote: post #84
K0balt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's blindingly obvious what the big bet is. The senior devs are going to come from the next generations of AI systems.

That’s the big bet, for sure… but if it’s reasoning that the supervising devs are injecting, and ai systems can’t reason, I guess it won’t work? Idk, I kinda think they do reason, though not in the way people might think.

It’s definitely true that they are statistical next token predictors, and that is intrinsically pattern matching, and reasonable to say not capable of reasoning.

But my intuition is that that is not really what is going on. The token prediction is the hardware layer. The software is the sum total of collective human culture they are trained on. The software is doing the reasoning, not the hardware. Like a Z80 can’t play chess, but software that runs on a Z80 certainly can.

Idk, that’s my -feeling- on the conundrum. Who knows, I guess we will find out.

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