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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

theguardian.com

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Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#151

Post by arjie »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good. Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes. Furthermore, video is persuasive t…

There is too much information that is only available in video form. You can use an LLM with the transcript quite effectively these days. I also run videos at higher speed and find that it doesn't help as much because it's a content density issue. Writers usually put more information into fewer words than speakers. Perhaps audio may not be as high-bandwidth a medium as text inherently. However, with an LLM you can tune up and down the text to your standard. I find it worthwhile to also ask for specific quotes, then find the right section of the video and watch it.

e.g. this was very useful when I recently clogged the hot-end of my 3d printer. Quick scan with LLM, ask quote, Cmd-F in Youtube Transcript, then click on timestamp and watch. `yt-dlp` can download the transcript and you can put prospective videos into this machine to identify ones that matter.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#152

Post by WheatMillington »

themafia wrote: post #140
abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

> and has the potential to debase shared reality. If only. What it actually has is the potential to debase the value of "AI." People will just eventually figure out that these tools are garbage and stop relying on them. I consider that a positive outcome.

People used to tell me the same about Wikipedia.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#153

Post by yakattak »

jppope wrote: post #143

Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?

Those sites typically end with “talk to your doctor”. There’s many creators out there whose entire platform is “Your doctor won’t tell you this!”. I trust the NHS, older CDC pages, Mayo clinic as platforms, more than I will ever trust youtube.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#155

Post by pengaru »

jeffbee wrote: post #33
gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#156

Post by justapassenger »

rvnx wrote: post #149
krior wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another post-Soviet country Other post-Soviet countries fare substantially better than Russia (Looking at GDP per capita, Russia is about 2500 dollars behind the economic motor of the EU - Bulgaria.)

Must be a misunderstanding 1) Post-soviet countries are doing amazingly well (Poland, Baltics, etc) and very fast growing + healthy (low criminality, etc) 2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone. 3) China is not a country lagging beh…

> 2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.

It's nearly impossible to bankrupt huge country like Russia. Unless there's civil unrest (or west grows balls to throw enough of resources to move the needle), they can continue the war for decades.

What Russia is doing is each week borrowing more and more from the future and screwing up next generations on a huge scale by destroying it's non-military industrial base, isolating economy from the world and killing hundreds of thousands of young man who could've spent decades contributing to the economy/demographics.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#157

Post by al_borland »

gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

> I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time.

I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.

When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple’s AI to do the rewrite), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I figured it would be good to send the person articles generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person listen to in a week?

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#158

Post by freediver »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #103
abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

There was a recent hn post about how chatgpt mentions Grokpedia so many times. Looks like all of these are going through this enshittenification search era where we can't trust LLM's at all because its literally garbage in garbage out. Someone had mentioned Kagi assistant in here and although they use API themselves but I feel like they might be able to provide their custom search in between, so if anyone's from Kagi…

Correct, Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search - with all modifications user made (eg blocked domains, lenses etc).

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#159

Post by trympet »

trympet wrote: post #135
zamadatix wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either. I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

> Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards Don’t get me started on the HHKB [1] with Topre membrane keyswitches. It is simply put the best keyboard on the market. Buy this. (No, Fujitsu didn’t pay me to say this) [1] - https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb/

Dunno why I’m getting downvoted. Is it because you disagree with my statement? Is it because I’m off topic? Do you think I’m a shill?

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#160

Post by xracy »

jppope wrote: post #143

Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?

Medical advice from videos is frequently of the "unhelpful" variety where people recommend home cures that work for some things for absolutely everything.

Also people are really partial to "one quick trick" type solutions without any evidence (or with low barrier to entry) in order to avoid a more difficult procedure that is more proven, but nasty or risky in some way.

For example, if you had cancer would you rather take:

"Ivermectin" which many people say anecdotally cured their cancer, and is generally proven to be harmless to most people (side-effects are minimal)

OR

"Chemotherapy" Which everyone who has taken agrees is nasty, is medically proven to fix Cancer in most cases, but also causes lots of bad side-effects because it's trying to kill your cancer faster than the rest of you.

One of these things actually cures cancer, but who wouldn't be interested in an alternative "miracle cure" that medical journals will tell you does "nothing to solve your problem", but plenty of snake oil salesman on the internet will tell you is a "miracle cure".

[Source] Hank green has a video about why these kinds of medicines are particularly enticing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC9glJa1-c0

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