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

bbc.com

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

#221

Post by BiteCode_dev »

roenxi wrote: post #216
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.

But to just inject a little optimism - the problem was substantially bigger before the internet. Previously it was possible to coordinate the astroturfing across the entire media landscape. Nowadays it is much harder because anyone can get information out to the world - at least in theory.

I think the opposite. Automation and scale made it possible to cheaply influence way more people. Information bubbles mean people are more convinced than ever.

Before you had one big influencer, usually the state, manipulating the news of your country. The alternative players were more trustworthy, because they had to if they wanted to keep credibility.

Now, any big company can buy a narrative when they need one. No reputation matters. No memory. No consequences for the long run.

It's literally pay to play.

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

#222

Post by mhitza »

newsclues wrote: post #215
WarmWash wrote: post #25

My worry dropped significantly when I saw that the result they manipulated was a query for: >2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Champion If they had changed the overview for the Nathans Contest winner, that would be seriously concerning. Or if they provided more examples of manipulating queries for things people actually search for. But it looks more like they are doing the equivalent of creating a made u…

What one person can do with a phone may be concerning, but what a small group of well funded actors can do can be a real problem.

And there's also the question of what data is fed into the system. And how bias is adjusted.

At one point I asked ChatGPT to tell me if there were any issues with a specific credit union, and it ranted in a negative way about (the generic concept) of credit unions. I had to point out multiple times that it can find handful of controversies for the larger established banks, yet it insisted keeping a more pessimistic opinion of unions.

This kind of information is a problem, even when ignoring outright hallucinated false facts (like being casually called a sex offender; recent article about an artist going through this matter), or this example.

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

#223

Post by roenxi »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #221
roenxi wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to just inject a little optimism - the problem was substantially bigger before the internet. Previously it was possible to coordinate the astroturfing across the entire media landscape. Nowadays it is much harder because anyone can get information out to the world - at least in theory.

I think the opposite. Automation and scale made it possible to cheaply influence way more people. Information bubbles mean people are more convinced than ever. Before you had one big influencer, usually the state, manipulating the news of your country. The alternative players were more trustworthy, because they had to if they wanted to keep credibility. Now, any big company can buy a narrative when they need one. No…

> Before you had one big influencer, usually the state, manipulating the news of your country. The alternative players were more trustworthy, because they had to if they wanted to keep credibility.

There isn't much in the way of evidence that is true. What we discovered when the internet came around is that the major players in the public sphere are generally low-credibility and just keep repeating that they are credible over and over again. As more diverse alternatives appear with the internet that narrative has been struggling. The new replacements have proven to be low-quality and a lot better than what they are overtaking.

The US discourse is a fascinating example of this where the traditional narrative setters may have gone legitimately crazy trying to rationalise how they're part of the reasonable and credible crowd and they just got rolled by Trump screaming that they were liars and that Mexico was going to pay for a border wall. That's what US voters thought looked like a better bet than these traditionally credible alternatives.

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

#224

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

hunterpayne wrote: post #163
moparts wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also said this: “ But our investigation also found the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement.” That’s a lot more alarming than just hotdogs.

Here is a brief selection of topics which foreign intelligence agencies have at some point tried to boost or manipulate: - Global Warming - AI Data Centers consume water - Various Covid treatments - Impact of AGW Now it doesn't mean these concerns aren't real. It does mean that when you read about such a topic, there is a significant probability the message have been manipulated for some government's interests. And o…

That's a nice curated list. COVID origins didn't make the cut? lol

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

#225

Post by Aldipower »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #220
Aldipower wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not how AI Overviews work.

That's what you think. It does. The AI results are steered.

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

#226

Post by wrxd »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #213

The quality of responses has generally gotten worse the more that all the AI providers have leaned on search. Now it’s default on for everything and annoying to turn off. The response you get back when search is off can be the complete opposite and is often more interesting.

In my experience without search I end up with an hallucination fest more time than not. In one sense that might be more interesting but I'm not sure that's what you mean :)

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

#227

Post by cnd78A »

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?

Taking into account our mediocre human nature, I wonder how much is actually true in what we say and believe (but can't even count on (human) statistic to answer that one, can't wait for AGI)

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

#228

Post by grog454 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #221
roenxi wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to just inject a little optimism - the problem was substantially bigger before the internet. Previously it was possible to coordinate the astroturfing across the entire media landscape. Nowadays it is much harder because anyone can get information out to the world - at least in theory.

I think the opposite. Automation and scale made it possible to cheaply influence way more people. Information bubbles mean people are more convinced than ever. Before you had one big influencer, usually the state, manipulating the news of your country. The alternative players were more trustworthy, because they had to if they wanted to keep credibility. Now, any big company can buy a narrative when they need one. No…

> Information bubbles mean people are more convinced than ever.

And therefore critical thinking is more important than ever. That isn't intrinsically a problem, but it is a problem for people that lack it.

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

#229

Post by cess11 »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #218
cess11 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet?" Because a person is alive while the LLM is a floating point number database with a questionable degree of determinism.

It's worse then that. The neural network itself is completely deterministic, but the software around it adds some RNG to make it seem more intelligent. It would be much more useful if you could get repeatability, but that wouldn't support the illusion that it's "thinking".

Right, this is true. However, when I make this point I try to be as succinct as possible to leave as little cognitive wiggle room for the reader as I can.

"It's just a database", up to roughly the sentence above, is short, quick to interpret and requires much more effort to start an attempt at refutation against than a longer sentence which might be more precise and technically satisfying due to the larger semantic and syntactic 'surface'.

I think of it more like an advert rather than an argument. People already know intellectually that it's a computer software thingie, it's the feeling I'd like to target. 'Coca-Cola is a watery drink with syrup and acid and a secret but quite long recipe of tasty flavours and aromas' is correct, but "Coke is it!" hits differently.

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

#230

Post by K0balt »

hunterpayne wrote: post #160
K0balt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the big bet, for sure… but if it’s reasoning that the supervising devs are injecting, and ai systems can’t reason, I guess it won’t work? Idk, I kinda think they do reason, though not in the way people might think. It’s definitely true that they are statistical next token predictors, and that is intrinsically pattern matching, and reasonable to say not capable of reasoning. But my intuition is that that is not…

"The software is the sum total of collective human culture they are trained on." Almost, they are the median or most popular aspects of the culture upon which they are trained. So you are getting the most popular way to do something, not the best (for some definition of best). That's why the claims about LLMs being geniuses is absurd. They almost by definition are going to have the average IQ of all the people on the…

Meh, while I’d agree that LLMs are idiot savants more than geniuses, I think you underestimate the general quality of training data. First, it’s all on data that was published or written. People below 80 is don’t publish or write at all, and when they do you can filter it with a regex. So already you skew the curve up 15 points or so. Then, factor in that published usually means 120+ and also includes the collective treasures of civilization. Even the average joes are going to skew towards things they are knowledgeable and passionate about, putting their best foot forward and so on. ( and the trolls get regexed to oblivion). Only the very clever trolls get through, and at least they pattern match for clever.
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