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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

#41

Post by simonw »

gloosx wrote: post #35
simonw wrote: post #34

If you ask Google "what's the name of the whale in half moon bay harbor?" it still confidently includes Teresa T in the AI summary, thanks to my frankly amateur attempt at index poisoning from a year and a half ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/teresa-t-whale-pillar-p...

Aren't you afraid Google will send you a threat for an attempt to manipulate AI responses?

If they do I'll have something fun to write about.

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

#42

Post by bhk »

gloosx wrote: post #35
simonw wrote: post #34

If you ask Google "what's the name of the whale in half moon bay harbor?" it still confidently includes Teresa T in the AI summary, thanks to my frankly amateur attempt at index poisoning from a year and a half ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/teresa-t-whale-pillar-p...

Aren't you afraid Google will send you a threat for an attempt to manipulate AI responses?

Any opinion voiced on the Internet can manipulate AI responses. Can Google suppress that?

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

#43

Post by seanhunter »

This is the same google who just a couple of years ago would confidently answer the question “In what year did Marilyn Monroe shoot JFK?” with 1963, which is impressive since she died in 1962.

So, this is not new and their “quiet fightback” will be half-hearted and ineffective. But probably most people won’t care.

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

#44

Post by mring33621 »

antonyt wrote: post #16
63 wrote: post #2

Seems like a lot of entities are "quietly" doing things these days. The llm-ification of every piece of text on the internet is driving me crazy

Drives me crazy too, but headline writers/editors were addicted to "quietly" long before LLMs. Online journalism has been full of these types of tropes for ages.

It's not crazy, it's visionary!

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

#45

Post by dmortin »

simmerup wrote: post #23
dmortin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strength of the sources are not a question of quantity. A hundred obscure blog post have not the same strength as one wikipedia link, because the latter is more trustworthy. There could be some indication beside the info showing the strength of the sources (how many major trustworthy sources support it, etc.).

Seems like a tall order to do that for literally everything. I guess there’ll be some guy at google going through every blog and saying whether it’s reliable or not?

That's exactly what PageRank is about, invented by Google.

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

#46

Post by latexr »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #20
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

AI is such garbage. You can't use it for anything.

If anyone wanted a great example of hyperbole, this one is up there with the best

I find it amusing how your reply can itself be used as an example of hyperbole (due to the second part). Is there a name for that? Autological¹ figure of speech?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word

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

#47

Post by notahacker »

dmortin wrote: post #5

There should be some warning if some "fact" is only supported by one or very few obscure sources. The strength of the sources should be clearly indicated in the answers to help users gauge how trustworthy the info is.

It does sometimes flag up sources, and when it does, the sources are often laughable (Reddit threads, or the vendor's own website [in response to an evaluation rather than factual question], or an AI generated SEO blog for some low profile company in a barely even adjacent industry). Sad considering what Google's origins were...

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

#48

Post by nonameiguess »

This feels like a basic critical thinking/epistemology thing that you (hopefully) pick up at some point in life, usually from experience finding reliable, canonical primary sources for data. You can't do that for everything. Being wrong about trivial factoids isn't the end of the world. You should, however, at least be capable of doing further investigation, realizing that Major League Eating has its own website, and that there is no event in South Dakota sanctioned by them. If you look at actual results, or even just think for a few seconds, you'd also realize that 7.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes is bush-league level nonsense that would not win a local church contest, let alone an international championship. That may not be obvious to all users of the Internet, but it would be if you've ever watched a real contests, looked at the results for a real contest, or try yourself to eat a high volume of hot dogs rapidly. You only need to do it once in your life and a basic smell alarm should go off in your head forever if someone puts out a claim that is very far from something you know to be true.

This is what human reasoning is and we're supposed to be good at it. At its best, this is what any reasonable education should do for you if you take it at all seriously, arming you with some capacity for doing prima facie sanity checks of poorly sourced claims.

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

#49

Post by delduca »

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…

[dead]

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

#50

Post by simmerup »

gowld wrote: post #36
simmerup wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a tall order to do that for literally everything. I guess there’ll be some guy at google going through every blog and saying whether it’s reliable or not?

This is what Google has been doing, via various methods, for 25 years.

And obviously it’s not working for the LLM as a commodity world
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