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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

#181

Post by dave7 »

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.

Maybe Google could come up with some fancy algorithm to give variable weight to the source pages, some sort of ranking system for pages on the web, instead of just assuming any random page contains 100% truth. Perhaps counting the tally of other pages on the web linking to this one might be one clue that this is a particularly highly ranked page? It would be quite the revolutionary idea!

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

#182

Post by suzzer99 »

jerf wrote: post #171
suzzer99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to ChatGPT, researchers are working on models that remember personal directives across sessions. IE - an actual personal assistant that gets to know you and your proclivities. So it's definitely on their radar. No idea how far along they are.

Unless that's something more than the already-common practice called "memories" that are text files held off to the side, that doesn't change what I meant. You can do all sorts of interesting things within the context window, but there's no feedback beyond that. Even if an frontier-LLM-sized neural net could do something that would somehow change its net on a pervasive level in response to things that happen to it, n…

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

#185

Post by doginasuit »

slopranker wrote: post #183

The weirdest assumption in this thread is that Google wants the AI answer to be correct. Correct enough to keep you from leaving the page, sure. But “truth” was never the product. The product is making you pay for SEO

> The product is making you pay for SEO

I'm not sure that tracks, most SEO is by 3rd parties. The product is ad views, they stopped caring about non-ad results a long time ago. I think they do care about the reputation of their model, this could actually make a difference.

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

#186

Post by nicbou »

simmerup wrote: post #57
ulrashida wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this will mean a resurgence of encyclopedias or other authoritative digital records that are known to be verified.

Well, I suspect the non-LLM ones will become much more expensive than they are now due to the specialist knowledge they’d require to make combined with the smaller pool of people willing to pay for the difference

And the fact that LLMs are actively taking traffic away from them

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

electr1cBugaloo wrote: post #161

Google AI Overview cannot be trusted at all. They will take a sample size of 1 (!!!) and present it in the AI overview. How I found out: I made a comment on reddit on a very niche topic for which no google hit or and thus no AI overview existed. To my surprise the next day when searching for my own reddit post, google would happily copy my reddit reply almost verbatim into the AI "overview" box, linking no other post…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by hungryhobbit »

Animats wrote: post #132
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…

> > But it is another good example that "AI" is just glorified search and there is not reasoning or thinking going on behind the covers. There is false decisiveness. Ask Google: "Is Blue Cruise available for the Ford Bronco?" (Blue Cruise is Ford's self-driving assistance system.) Google reply is: "Yes, BlueCruise is available for the Ford Bronco! Ford expanded its hands-free highway driving technology to include the…

This is a problem that existed long before search engines or even computers.

Check out "Egyptologists". Basically it was a fad in Britain for wealthy people to go to Egypt, come back, and tell everyone how great it was. This would cause other people to also go and report back.

But then what started happening was people would just read the accounts of people who actually went, and write their own books on Egypt ... without ever having gone. And of course, lots of people read their books.

Soon, Britain had this wildly distorted view of what "Egypt" was. Simple example: the British people were repressed prudes at the time, so when they got to a non-Prudish country they became a bit ... un-repressed. They fixated on sexual things, like the famous trope of the Egyptian belly dancer.

Repressed Britains back home (including the people writing books without first-hand knowledge) fixated on these aspects (because, again, they were repressed) and so there was this giant amplification of belly dancers and a similar sexual aspect ... when there was nothing especially sexy about Egypt (beyond not being as repressed).

There were other major (non-belly dancer) distortions as well of course, but the point is once you get this kind of echo chamber (from humans without first-hand experience or AIs), it inherently creates distortions that, instead of reflecting reality, reflect the viewer's own issues.

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

#189

Post by winocm »

electr1cBugaloo wrote: post #161

Google AI Overview cannot be trusted at all. They will take a sample size of 1 (!!!) and present it in the AI overview. How I found out: I made a comment on reddit on a very niche topic for which no google hit or and thus no AI overview existed. To my surprise the next day when searching for my own reddit post, google would happily copy my reddit reply almost verbatim into the AI "overview" box, linking no other post…

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

#190

Post by dogwalker5000 »

keeda wrote: post #83
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.

> 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…

> 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 ;-)

To my knowledge, AI still can’t tell the difference between correct and incorrect. It can’t tell if something doesn’t make sense. That’s why to this day AI still makes mistakes on simple things.

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