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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

#211

Post by im3w1l »

EasyMark wrote: post #174
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.

that's the part that scares me. I railed on someone's comment the other day about "indexes will come back into fashion" but the more I think about how much garbage has increased in just the past 2 to 3 years, I think I was wrong. Indexes and forums may be the only way to have a sane net where you can find things. Perhaps communities linking together in a ring like format, a "web ring" of sorts.

Good indices lead to good search engines (engines can make use of indices) Good search engines lead to bad indices (by obsoleting them) Bad indices lead to bad search engines Bad search engines lead to good indices

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

#212

Post by lukev »

DougBTX wrote: post #207
lukev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t just seem it. They are by design. We talk about models “hallucinating” but that’s us bringing an external value judgement after the fact. The actual process of token generation works precisely the same. It’d be more accurate to say that models always hallucinate.

> The actual process of token generation works precisely the same I’d be wary of generalising it like that, it is like saying that all programs run on the same set of CPU instructions. NNs are function approximators, where the code is expressed in model weights rather than text, but that doesn’t make all functions the same.

You misunderstand. I mean that the model itself is doing exactly the same thing whether the output is a “hallucination “ or happens to be fact. There isn’t even a theoretical way to distinguish between the two cases based only on the information encoded in the model.

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

#213

Post by Vetch »

ta8645 wrote: post #144
threeseed wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can ask a human to explain the steps they took to answer a question. I can ask a human a question 100 times and I don't get back 100 different answers. None of those applies to an LLM.

You can ask an LLM to explain itself.. it will give you a logical stepwise progression from your question to its answer. It will often contain a mistake, but the same is true for a human. And if your LLM is giving you 100 different answers, then it has been configured to do so. Because instead, it could be configured to never vary at all. It could be 100% reproducible if so desired.

> It will often contain a mistake...but the same is true for a human.

If this were true textbooks could not work. Given a question, we don't consult random humans but experts of their field. If I have a question on algorithms, I might check a text by Knuth, I wouldn't randomly ask on the street.

> It could be 100% reproducible if so desired.

Reproducible does not mean better. For harder questions, it's often best to generate multiple answers at a higher temperature than to greedily pick the highest probability tokens.

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

#214

Post by mvdtnz »

Your usual reminder that there was a guy at Google who was so impressed by their LLM that he considered it sentient. And this was two years ago when the AI was presumably far less developed than the current abonination.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

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

#215

Post by lukev »

nicklecompte wrote: post #199
eynsham wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I do think trusting an LLM is less firm ground for knowledge than other ways of learning.

Say I have a model that I know is 98% accurate. And it tells me a fact.

I am now justified in adjusting my priors and weighting the fact quite heavily at .98. But that’s as far as I can get.

If I learned a fact from an online anonymously edited encyclopedia, I might also weight that a 0.98 to start with. But that’s a strictly better case because I can dig more. I can look up the cited sources, look at the edit history, or message the author. I can use that as an entry point to end up with significantly more than 98% conviction.

That’s a pretty important difference with respect to knowledge. It isn’t just about accuracy percentage.

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

#216

Post by astrange »

threeseed wrote: post #132
ta8645 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs so far seem to be entirely unverifiable. I don't understand this complaint. Are they any less verifiable than a human?

I can ask a human to explain the steps they took to answer a question. I can ask a human a question 100 times and I don't get back 100 different answers. None of those applies to an LLM.

The only reason you can't verify a server side LLM is you can't see the model. It is possible to look at its activations if you have the model.

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

#217

Post by astrange »

SirMaster wrote: post #131
candiddevmike wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the impact all of those erase tools are having on LLM training. The ones that replaced all of these highly upvoted comments with nonsense.

I'm pretty sure those "erase" tools are just for the front-end and reddit keeps the original stuff in the back-end. And surely the deal Google made was for the back-end source data, or probably the data that includes the original and the edit.

The LLM does a summary of web search results. It's quoting what you can see, not pretrained knowledge, afaik.

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

#218

Post by ta8645 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #191
ta8645 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Nothing of the sort. I'm trying to understand why anyone cares about formal verifiability in this context, since it's not something we rely on when asking humans to answer questions for us. We evaluate any answer we get without such mathematical proofs, and instead simply judge the answer we're given on its fit and usefulness.

Anyone who doubts the usefulness of even these nascent LLMs is fooling themselves. The proof is in the pudding, they already do a great job, even with all their obvious limitations.

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

#219

Post by tux1968 »

astrange wrote: post #216
threeseed wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can ask a human to explain the steps they took to answer a question. I can ask a human a question 100 times and I don't get back 100 different answers. None of those applies to an LLM.

The only reason you can't verify a server side LLM is you can't see the model. It is possible to look at its activations if you have the model.

Do the activations tell you anything more than what the LLM delivers in plain text? Other than for trivial bugs in the LLM code, I don't think so.

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

#220

Post by rchaud »

zogrodea wrote: post #198
reustle wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kids are far less knowledgeable about how modern software works because they don't know of an Internet that didn't have algorithmic recommendations. They have to be taught to do things like click "Not Interested/Don't recommend channel" to improve their feed. Dark pattern designs make this harder by hiding these options behind tiny 3-dot buttons.
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