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

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 235 posts

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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

dogwalker5000 wrote: post #190
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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by hotstickyballs »

keeda wrote: post #111
suzzer99 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet? The problem is LLMs have no capacity for shame. My Dad got taken in by a Target gift card scam. He felt so terrible, he almost didn't even tell me about it. He may get scammed again, but not by anything remotely like that. To LLMs, all mistakes just get washed together into the same bucket. They don't spend days feeling depressed and st…

> The problem is LLMs have no capacity for shame. I know what you mean but I can't help but be cheeky: https://www.fastcompany.com/91383271/googles-chatbot-apologi... Jokes aside, shame does not change the underlying point though. Despite feeling ashamed for being tricked, as you point out people can still get scammed again by different tricks. I think your point is more about learning from mistakes than shame. Which…

That's not shame, the LLM did not mope about for days before deciding to pick itself up again and go to work.

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

#193

Post by suzzer99 »

incr_me wrote: post #178
idiotsecant wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame is a wildly useful human emotion. Shame of letting down the tribal unit formed basically all of civilization. Shame is good.

Some shame is good and other shame is bad. Some guilt/shame is indicative of the development of the self, other guilt/shame is a cause and effect of stunted development of the self. I like Winnicott on this: > How important it is, therefore, for a baby to have his mother consistently looking after him, looking after him over a period of time, surviving his attacks, and eventually there to be the object of the tender…

> Some shame is good and other shame is bad.

Yeah, like most human emotions. The right amount of fear keeps you alive. Too much fear debilitates you.

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

#194

Post by jandrewrogers »

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.

At the limit AI and indexing are the same problem. It is supposed to be glorified search. The only thing that changes is the depth and complexity of the patterns you can search for using the “index”.

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

#196

Post by balls187 »

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…

Not just google. I asked ChatGPT about some pen refills, and it gave me a very factual response sourcing to my own reddit post discussing the topic.

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

#197

Post by gverrilla »

suzzer99 wrote: post #94
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…

> How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet? The problem is LLMs have no capacity for shame. My Dad got taken in by a Target gift card scam. He felt so terrible, he almost didn't even tell me about it. He may get scammed again, but not by anything remotely like that. To LLMs, all mistakes just get washed together into the same bucket. They don't spend days feeling depressed and st…

Shame is out of fashion. Remember back when people felt ashamed to be stupid? Now it's hypernormalized. These past few days people have been drinking dishwater detergent in Brazil to 'fight' against health regulations[0] and 'the big bad state' - shame is not even a part of the equation anymore.

0: Couldn't find a good source in English on Google, because Google also has no shame at all to offer such a poor search service. But it has been all over brazilian news.

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

#198

Post by stickfigure »

suzzer99 wrote: post #94
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…

> How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet? The problem is LLMs have no capacity for shame. My Dad got taken in by a Target gift card scam. He felt so terrible, he almost didn't even tell me about it. He may get scammed again, but not by anything remotely like that. To LLMs, all mistakes just get washed together into the same bucket. They don't spend days feeling depressed and st…

I think this is not quite true. They feel "shame"... right up until you wipe the context window. And then they forget any valuable lesson they might have learned.

The problem with LLMs is that they live in eternal September. Keeping a few bits of compressed residual context around isn't enough to offset the refreshed naivete.

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

#199

Post by in-silico »

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

A bold claim given that the current top post on HN is "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212493

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

#200

Post by rags2riches »

realmofthemad wrote: post #70
coffeefirst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. So that's what one guy can do. When you realize how much astroturf is going into Reddit, most social media platforms, and the efforts to manipulate wikipedia for political gain, this is a very real problem.

It's very hard to tell how much is actually fake though. Are there any good statistics on this?

If there were reliable statistics, I'd much rather have the methods used to produce those statistics than the numbers.
Post reply on HN