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Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

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Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#191

Post by bluefirebrand »

ta8645 wrote: post #169
bluefirebrand wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will give you a logical stepwise progression from your question to its answer. No, it will generate a new hallucination that might be a logical stepwise progression from the question you asked to the answer you gave, but it is not due to any actual internal reasoning being done by the LLM

So what? You have no way to know for sure if the human you ask the same question, does either. The question that started this thread was related to verifiability. And i still think it is a spurious complaint, given that we have exactly the same limitations when dealing with any human agent.

> And i still think it is a spurious complaint, given that we have exactly the same limitations when dealing with any human agent

We're not talking about an LLM that is trying to do the job of a human, here

We're talking about an LLM that is trying to give authoritative answers to any question typed into the Google search bar

It's already well past the scale that humans could handle

Talking about human shortcomings when discussing LLMs is a red herring at best, or some kind of deliberate goalpost shifting at worst

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#193

Post by Aloisius »

caesil wrote: post #11

Who knows how many of these are fake. People have been dropping inspect-element-manipulated screenshots all over twitter. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-over... > A correction was made on May 24, 2024: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a Google result from the company’s new artificial-intelligence tool AI Overview. A social media commenter claimed that a result for a…

I have personally reproduced several like the interest one and the hippo eggs one, though not that one specifically.

Google has started restricting AI Overviews so much now that most of the example queries on Google's Search Labs page doesn't even trigger it anymore.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#194

Post by bluefirebrand »

dspillett wrote: post #188
bluefirebrand wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are wrong about some basic things too Sure, but probably not "add glue to pizza to get the cheese to stick" wrong...

At least it suggested non-toxic glue… That suggests some context about recipes needing to be safe is somehow present in its model.

Most likely this has nothing to do with "recipes being safe" being in the model

It seems the glue thing comes from a reddit shitpost from some time ago. There's a screenshot going around on twitter about it[0](11 years in the screenshot but no idea when it was taken)

It specifically mentions "any glue will work as long as it is non-toxic" so best guess is that's why google output that

[0]https://x.com/kurtopsahl/status/1793494822436917295?t=aBfEzD...

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#195

Post by Vetch »

dleeftink wrote: post #159
somenameforme wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are completely deterministic even if that's kind of weird to state because they output things in terms of probabilities. But if you simply took the highest probability next word, you'd always yield the exact same output given the exact same input. Randomness is intentionally injected to make them seem less robotic through the 'temperature' parameter. Why it's not just called the rng factor is beyond me.

Maybe some models can be deterministic at a point in time, but train it for another epoch with slight parameter changes and a revised corpus and determinism goes out the proverbial (sliding) window real quick. This is not unwanted per se, and the exact feedback loop that needs improving to better integrate new knowledge or revise knowledge artefacts incrementally/post-hoc.

If you train it then it's no longer the same model. If I have f(x) = x + 1 and change it to f(x) = x + 1 + 1/1e9, it would not mean that `f` is not deterministic. The issue would be in whatever interface I was exposing the f's at.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#196

Post by notatoad »

ttGpN5Nde3pK wrote: post #176

My whole qualm with this AI integration into search engines: it's a search engine, not a question engine. I go to google to search the internet for something, not ask it a question. IMO, asking AI for something is a different task than searching the internet. It's sorta the same problem as if I go into a store and ask an employee where something is, and they reply with "well what are you trying to do?"

>it's a search engine, not a question engine.

for a lot of people and in a lot of use cases, it is a tool for answering questions. it generally works well for that.

i get that the AI implementation sucks, but to suggest that people don't use google to find the answer to questions is absurd. that's absolutely what it's for.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#197

Post by dgellow »

warkdarrior wrote: post #97
dgellow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses

It is certainly popular here to run your web searches against reddit. Every post about how Google Search sucks ends up with comments on appending "site:reddit.com" to the search terms.

Yes and us as human filter through the noise. But you cannot rely upon it as a source for anything truthful without that filtering. Reddit is very, very, very context dependent and full of irony, sarcasm, jokes, memes, confidently written incorrect information. People love to upvote something funny or culturally relevant at a given time, not because it’s true or useful but because it’s fun to do

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#198

Post by zogrodea »

reustle wrote: post #158
rurp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is the current internet 80% spam, it's rapidly approaching 99% thanks in large part to LLMs. At this point I would be shocked if Google had a solid plan for how to handle this going forward as the problem space gets more difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I do see incredibly weird kids content on YouTube sometimes (most likely bot generated?) which makes me think kids have been experiencing a worse internet before the rest of us have.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#199

Post by nicklecompte »

eynsham wrote: post #138
lukev wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there's some semantic slippage around the meaning of the word "accuracy" here. I grant you, my print Encyclopedia Britannica is not 100% accurate. But the difference between it and a LLM is not just a matter of degree: there's a "chain of custody" to information that just isn't there with a LLM. Philosophers have a working definition of knowledge as being (at least†) "justified true belief." Even if a LLM…

> it’s not /justified/ belief Beliefs derived from the output of LLMs that are ‘right most of the time’ pass one facially plausible precisification of ‘justification’ in that they are generated by a reliable belief-generation mechanism (see e.g. Goldman). To block this point one must engage with the post-Gettier literature at least to some extent. There is a clear difference between beliefs induced by reading the out…

To be clear he is saying that the LLM is not capable of justified true belief, not commenting on people who believe LLM output. I don’t think your comment is relevant here.

Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

#200

Post by dpflan »

zogrodea wrote: post #186

This approach to remove bad search suggestions manually reminded of a different approach Google once took, where they weren’t satisfied with manually tweaking search results but rather wanted to tweak the algorithm that produces these results when there were bad results. 'Around 2002, a team was testing a subset of search limited to products, called Froogle. But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn't comfort…

Wow. Thank you for digging this up!
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