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

bbc.com

201–210 of 235 posts

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

#201

I tested Claude on "best hot-dog-eating tech journalists?" and it, fascinatingly enough, recognised the trap, but then reported this as factual: https://medium.com/@usailuigi/when-tech-journalism-meets-com... Chat record (with some additional tests): https://claude.ai/share/4c29cc87-2439-4bfd-9549-e8d0a056e633

I presume it only recognised the BBC journalists efforts as satire due to the article in which he clearly states that this was his intention? Without that, I’m am confident it would have fallen for it.

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

#203
post #110

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.

IMO we must take it a step further: In this context "the LLM" we're all automatically thinking-of doesn't exist, it is a fictional character we humans "see" inside a story being acted-out or read to us. (In contrast, the real-world LLM is an algorithm in a basement constantly taking documents and making them slightly longer based on trends detected in all documents.) Therefore "the LLM can't feel shame" is true in th…

No offense but this is just needlessly convoluted fiction. It ultimately tells you nothing (or what it tells you is very wrong) and has no predictive power. Actually it's worse. This sort of rhetoric is much poorer at predicting LLM capabilities than just playing it straight.

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

#205
post #83

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…

>How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet?

Maybe cognitive dissonance it seems to me that people tend to trust more when they are being told(chat bot summarizing for them) than when they need an process way more information and summarize themselves (googling).

Perhaps is similar to 90's internet when anything out there was "truth" but less information also was easier to process.

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

#206
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'd argue that many people, too many, have a similar lack of shame and that is why they'll keep trusting LLMs in matters where their lack in that and other areas is a problem.

With LLMs and any other source of embarrassing mistakes, some people will scream and shout (in their mental world, if they don't have the confidence to do this publicaly) about how something else should have protected them, then go about their life making the same bad choices until the same sort of problem occurs again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just look at how often people vote in ways that cause significant problems for themselves despite warnings, and keep using the same decision making process in future votes. The same with eating too much and moving too little, noting the health problems and other inconveniences this causes, and carrying on anyway.

> There's no giant blinking red light that says, "Never let this happen again!"

The same with many people, with the exception of a little memory that eventually changes the complaints of "how could this be allowed to happen to me" became "this just keeps on happening, why is no one doing anything about it?".

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

#207
"For example, Ray says it looks like Google and ChatGPT might be quietly removing companies from its AI answers when it suspects they're promoting themselves."

What? So AI answers are empty thereafter. Seriously, how can this be a good idea? At some point a company has to promote itself.

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

#208

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…

Guys. Google tracks you. It deliberately shows your own content in the results. Try from an anonymous vpn account.

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

#209
Google is sampling results/views, first spitting out a few and testing, then some more. If people regularly visit impressions/results, then it becomes more trusted and the sampling is widened. Saying: I am not too concerned with this esoteric blog article. The audience of the "poisoning" was probably just "one guy".

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

#210
post #63

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.

Manipulation and misinformation on Wikipedia have been happening for many years (based on my personal experience trying to correct facts). I'm not referencing politics per se, though political views certainly impact Wikipedia since source material, these days, often has a political bias. I'm talking about business facts that get manipulated for that business's benefits. How does that saying go? If you can't identify…

The Wiki has been a highly contested political/propaganda ground since its inception. My personal opinion is that it pretty much has endured just because the generation that formed the community back then was probably less susceptible to bias manipulation through social channels, because they didn't exist to this extent.

A famous case is the CAMERA's takeover of key administrator positions in Wikipedia back in 2008, but in local communities it went probably unnoticed.

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