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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

#351

Post by antifa »

ysavir wrote: post #347
manquer wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that what Reddit is or digg was ? Link aggregators ? Gaming that is solved problem , you can use human bot farms to brigade and astroturf and you can even motivate people to do it for free . If cost of spamming is cheaper than cost of moderation, spam will win

Not quite like reddit and digg. You can bot farm those because the lists are common to all. In this search engine, let's say there's you, me, person three, and spammer. You you are following me, and I'm following person three. Spammer isn't in any of our networks. When you use the search engine, you only see results that you, me, or person three manually tagged as worthwhile. Any pages or content that Spammer tagged…

What happens when I need to search a term that's outside the scope of topics that my followees are trusted for? Then it's a spammer free-for-all?

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

#352

Post by noncoml »

fragmede wrote: post #331
noncoml wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too.” But even when I’m wrong I’m not 100% off. Not “to help with depression jump of a bridge” or “use glue to keep the cheese on the pizza” kind of wrong.

So you think. Seems like hubris to believe you're not though. I'm blind to what I'm blind to, and while I'd link to think I'm never wrong, the reality is that I often am. The biggest personal growth for me was in not needing to be right.

I disagree. Not only for myself but for the vast majority of human kind.

LLMs are just a statistical model. It can claim that it’s normal for pigs to have wings and fly to the moon if it’s in the training data. No human, free of a mental/cognitive disorder, will be that wrong.

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

#353

Post by bluefirebrand »

vidarh wrote: post #338
bluefirebrand wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will give you a logical stepwise progression from your question to its answer. No, it will generate a new hallucination that might be a logical stepwise progression from the question you asked to the answer you gave, but it is not due to any actual internal reasoning being done by the LLM

We have no clear evidence the same isn't true for humans, and some that it might be. See experiments with split brain patients, that have shown the brain halves will readily explain how they made decisions they provably never made.

I think we have thousands of years of evidence that the same isn't true for humans

The fact that one human brain is composed in two half brains that each seem to be able to function fairly independently when separated doesn't seem like it changes that much

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

#354

Post by kenjackson »

threeseed wrote: post #154
kenjackson wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask a human what the meaning of life is and how it impacts their day to day interactions. I know I can tell you an answer but I couldn’t tell you steps about how I got it. And if you asked it to me twice I’d definitely give different answers unless you told me to give the same answer. In part I’d give a different answer because if someone asks me the same question twice I assume the first answer wasn’t sufficient.

No one is taking about existential questions about meaning of life. We are talking about basic things like whether or not to eat rocks or put glue in recipes. We can answer those questions with a chain of logic and repeatability.

And those specific questions get repeatable answers on ChatGPT for me.

Here are two answers I got which seem as close as you’d expect any human to give:

“No, people should not eat rocks. Rocks are not digestible and can cause serious harm to the digestive system, including blockages and damage to internal organs. Eating rocks can lead to severe health problems and should be avoided.”

“No, people should not eat rocks. Rocks are not digestible and can cause serious harm to the digestive system, including blockages, abrasions, and potential poisoning from harmful minerals or substances. It's important to consume only food items that are safe and meant for human consumption.”

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

#355

Post by freshpretzels »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #63

It's debatable whether Google has truly lost the plot because of the "AI wars", but the moment the statement "Bing returns more sensible results than you" becomes verifiably true, it's... cause for concern? The approach that Google appears to have taken, which is to assume that the top-ranked part of its current search index is a sensible knowledge base, may have been true some years ago, but definitely isn't now: fo…

> To me, it seems that returning to the concept that search results should at least reflect a broad consensus of what is true is a necessary first step for Google. As part of that, learning to flag obvious trolling, clickbait and bad-faith content is paramount.

Who will decide what is obvious trolling and bad-faith content and how will they decide it? The problem they have is that search is only useful if it gives users what they are looking for. Their business model though is predicated on finding a way to introduce ads into the mix, and if they are also then trying to become arbiters of what truth people find and see, then all the conflicting goals will create a series of contradictory requirements. The search tools that usefully find what the user is looking for, with helpful suggestions, will win. Once users find that their experience is curated and that they are coerced by unelected arbiters and censors they will not trust the platform in question and someone else will get that market share.

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

antifa wrote: post #351
ysavir wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite like reddit and digg. You can bot farm those because the lists are common to all. In this search engine, let's say there's you, me, person three, and spammer. You you are following me, and I'm following person three. Spammer isn't in any of our networks. When you use the search engine, you only see results that you, me, or person three manually tagged as worthwhile. Any pages or content that Spammer tagged…

What happens when I need to search a term that's outside the scope of topics that my followees are trusted for? Then it's a spammer free-for-all?

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by freshpretzels »

rurp wrote: post #150
PreInternet01 wrote: post #63

It's debatable whether Google has truly lost the plot because of the "AI wars", but the moment the statement "Bing returns more sensible results than you" becomes verifiably true, it's... cause for concern? The approach that Google appears to have taken, which is to assume that the top-ranked part of its current search index is a sensible knowledge base, may have been true some years ago, but definitely isn't now: fo…

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.

I don’t think this is a real problem because as users start being more intentional about who they subscribe to and more thorough in ranking content according to its usefulness and quality, the low quality stuff or regurgitated stuff will just vanish.

Why would it matter if there are clones of the best, say, blog post on how to make spicy ramen? If they are not adding anything new or making that original effort better, then they will not surface in searches as search tools improve. Nobody will save that content or recirculate it or refer to it when they need to remember how to make spicy ramen.

And people will build curated subscriptions and followings and recommendations that are more tailored to the individual, and we will spend more time determining who is trustworthy and who is not.

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

#358

Post by milesvp »

somenameforme wrote: post #123
jononor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encyclopedia Britannica is also wrong in a reproducible and fixable way. And the input queries a finite set. It's output does not change due to random or arbitrary things. It is actually possible to verify. LLMs so far seem to be entirely unverifiable.

LLMs are completely deterministic even if that's kind of weird to state because they output things in terms of probabilities. But if you simply took the highest probability next word, you'd always yield the exact same output given the exact same input. Randomness is intentionally injected to make them seem less robotic through the 'temperature' parameter. Why it's not just called the rng factor is beyond me.

I think you’re missing a subtlety with markov chains. It’s not about picking the next work with highest probability, it about picking the next word using the next word probability distribution. I played with them almost 20 years ago, and the difference in output was pretty obvious even with simple trigrams. The poetry produced was just better.

I can’t imagine any modern llm not using a probabilty distribution function for the same reason.

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

#359

Post by ein0p »

zogrodea wrote: post #186

This approach to remove bad search suggestions manually reminded of a different approach Google once took, where they weren’t satisfied with manually tweaking search results but rather wanted to tweak the algorithm that produces these results when there were bad results. 'Around 2002, a team was testing a subset of search limited to products, called Froogle. But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn't comfort…

Google could buy all the wood glue in the world, but probably not all the rocks

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

#360

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

astrange wrote: post #233
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #84

I'm waiting for some clever hacker to come up some sort of logic bomb that causes the learning sets to become worthless. Something innocuous to a non ai scientist human but is otherwise fatal to the LLM data sets.

It's just text. You cant make some text that's magically dangerous.

"text" made the LLMs report offensive and give unfiltered replies to inqiiries. To think what I said above can't happen during the web scraping process is naive. Thanks for the down d00t.
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