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

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 387 posts

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

#281

Post by chucke1992 »

lawn wrote: post #125
PreInternet01 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the most likely take here is that Google's leadership truly did not recognize how utterly awful the quality of their flagship search index had become over the years. I mean, it explains a lot, but still... you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent... and this is what you make of it? As the kids say: SMH!

> you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent The ridiculous focus on on leet-code is surely industry-leading (because whatever Google does becomes industry-leading) but it sure isn't a good way to filter for competency.

I heard a funny quote that "today we have a new generation of developers who learnt how to pass interviews but don't know how code, and we have an old generation of developers who know how to code but forgot how to pass interviews. Or maybe never knew".

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

#282

Post by CatWChainsaw »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #13
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #10

How hard can it possibly be to just turn off the entire AI-generated overview functionality given that it just got introduced...

It seems to be turned off for me. And I was in beta testing for a month. Or maybe they are figuring out who is doing weird searches and turning off for them. In any case this thing is just hilarious. Just right after their AI painted historical figures as black.

So far I have not seen it ever in either Firefox or 2-3 Chromium-based browsers, on a handful of computers in multiple locations.

I don't see a way google can make this work. As I understand it LLM confabulations can be reduced but never eliminated owing to how they're built. Google could try and create a fact-checking department to make queries reduced to falsehoods or bullshit but then they face the problem of appointing themselves arbiters of the "truth". The only way to win is to not play the game, as I see it. I wish the collective AI fever would break already.

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

#283

Post by chucke1992 »

notatoad wrote: post #196
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.

the thing with search is that a human has to use reasoning on the result, while with AI the expectation

Thus when a human sees a suggestion to use glue on pizza, it would question the result. While AI can't.

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

#284

Post by gerdesj »

duskwuff wrote: post #268
gerdesj wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spend say £500M (USD/GBP/EUR) on experts, per annum. Imagine typing a search and getting a response: "Give us 30 mins to respond - here's a token, come back at 17:35 with your token" ... and then you get an answer from an expert, which also gets indexed. The clever bit decides when to defer to an expert instead of returning answers from the index. I'll leave the finer details out.

Google Answers was launched in 2002 and retired in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

"users would pay someone else to do the search."

My notion isn't a rehash of Google Answers. Google pays the "someone else", not you.

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

#285

Post by astrange »

39896880 wrote: post #273
astrange wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need "hypercapitalist surveillance" to show someone ads for a PS5 when they search for "buy PS5". If they're doing surveillance they're not doing a good job of it, I make no effort to hide from them and approximately none of their ads are personalized to me. They are instead personalized to the search results instead of what they know from my history. Meta is the one with highly personalized ads.

If Google doesn’t need surveillance, why do they surveil? Why then do they waste the time to track your browsing history, your location, and etc? If simple keyword matching was enough, why would they spend literally billions a year on other tactics?

Why does Google launch and then cancel five messaging apps a year? As a monopoly, they mostly don't need good reasons to do anything.

It does help with their Doubleclick business - ads on websites other than Google. I don't find these too personalized either, but they do try.

And of course, many people actually like that Chrome saves their browsing history.

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

#286

Post by VancouverMan »

giantrobot wrote: post #224
oldgradstudent wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a magnificent source of useful knowledge. r/AskHistorians r/bikewrench To name just two. There is nothing even remotely comparable. But you need to be able to detect sarcasm and irony.

I don't know about bikewrench but AskHistorians is a useful source of knowledge because it is strongly moderated and curated. It's not just a bunch of random assholes spouting off on topics. Top level replies are unceremoniously removed if they lack sourcing or make unsourced/unsubstantiated claims. Top level posters also try to self-correct by clearly indicating when they're making claims of fact that are disputed o…

In general, I have trouble trusting environments that can be described as "strongly moderated and curated".

I find that environments that rely on censorship tend to foster dogma, rather than knowledge and real understanding of the topics at hand. They give an illusion of quality and trustworthiness. It's something we see happen at this site to some extent, for example.

I'd rather see ideas and information being freely expressed, and if necessary, pitted against one another, with me being the one to judge for myself the ideas/claims/positions/arguments/perspectives/etc. that are being expressed.

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

#287

Post by astrange »

duskwuff wrote: post #269
astrange wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "making up an answer" will look different from "quoting pretrained knowledge" because eg the model might've decided you were asking a creative writing question.

Can you cite a source for this, or are you speculating? My understanding was the opposite -- that the activity of a confabulating LLM is indistinguishable from one giving factually accurate responses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817

Some things like:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18168

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824

There are various reasons an LLM might have incorrect "beliefs" - the input text was false, training doesn't try to preserve true beliefs, quantization certainly doesn't. So it can't be perfectly addressed, but some things leading to it seem like they can be found.

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817

This seems like it's true since LLMs are a finite size, but in Google's case it has a "truth oracle" (the websites it's quoting)… the problem is it's a bad oracle.

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

#288

Post by astrange »

lukev wrote: post #271
astrange wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "making up an answer" will look different from "quoting pretrained knowledge" because eg the model might've decided you were asking a creative writing question.

This is confidently stated and incorrect.

Do you have anything to add?

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

#289

Post by lukev »

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…

Upon a second reading, this is an excellent point.

For the sake of clarity, let's remove LLMs from the equation and posit the existence of Encyclopedia Eric. Ask Eric any question, and he will happily research it and come back to you with the answer. But he can sometimes be sloppy in his research, and he gives the correct answer only X percent of the time.

Furthermore, Encyclopedia Eric steadfastly refuses to cite his own sources or explain his reasoning in any way. He simply states his answer.

Can Eric be a source of knowledge? It seems evident that the answer is no, for low values of X. For higher values of X, the question becomes murkier.

The temptation at this point is to give up on defining knowledge at all and fall back on a sort of Bayesian epistemology where everything is ultimately a matter of probabilities.

Yet there does seem to be a distinct practical difference between a knowledge source that is "traversable" (like a standard encyclopedia) vs a knowledge source that is not (like Eric.) Is that part of the definition of knowledge? You're right, that is at least a Gettier adjacent question.

I think we can all agree that for current LLMs the value of X is definitely too small to count as knowledge.

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

#290

Post by eynsham »

lukev wrote: post #289
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…

Upon a second reading, this is an excellent point. For the sake of clarity, let's remove LLMs from the equation and posit the existence of Encyclopedia Eric. Ask Eric any question, and he will happily research it and come back to you with the answer. But he can sometimes be sloppy in his research, and he gives the correct answer only X percent of the time. Furthermore, Encyclopedia Eric steadfastly refuses to cite hi…

I am glad that you think it an excellent point!

I think that this might be a nice way of getting round my objection, but there is one worry, which is that X is relative to a distribution on the questions we ask when we aren’t dealing with Encyclopedia Eric but with an LLM. I don’t actually use LLMs very much myself, partly out of arrogance and Luddite tendencies. But I suspect that the value of X for some sorts of questions (simple quiz questions, maybe?) and some LLMs (maybe not Google’s) will be high enough to end up in the murky case.

Of course, both you and I agree that there /is/ clearly a difference. I can see the attraction of appealing to the intuitive or pretheoretic notion of knowledge, since it’s a fairly straightforward way of stating the difference and it’s not obvious how else one might put it (I suppose ‘LLMs don’t explicitly think through the facts stored when deciding what to say’ is one way of putting it.)

I remember some time ago rather sleepily watching John Hawthorne talk about conditionals; my sole memory was of his banging on about ‘the little logician in the brain’ (I think the point was something like: some conditionals seem [in]felicitous in virtue of form because the little logician in the brain is reading them; others seem infelicitous because we examine them more closely and look e.g. at the referents involved, in which case e.g. Gricean considerations apply). One difference at least in the case of LLMs that makes sense to me is that there is no ‘little logician’ in LLMs.

Post reply on HN