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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

theguardian.com

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Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#61

Post by sidewndr46 »

gumboshoes wrote: post #24

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#63

Post by sidewndr46 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #37
jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

YouTube has almost no original knowledge. Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions. I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.

I've noticed that the YouTubers I enjoy the most are the ones that are good presenter's, good editor's, and have a traditional text blog as well.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#65

Post by threetonesun »

adrian_b wrote: post #51
jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like univ…

There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text. Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.

As someone who used to do instructional writing, I'm not sure that's true for those specific examples, but I acknowledge that making a video is exponentially cheaper and easier than generating good diagrams, illustrations, or photography with clear steps to follow.

Or to put it another way, if you were building a Lego set, would you rather follow the direction book, or follow along with a video? I fully acknowledge video is better for some things (try explaining weight lifting in text, for example, it's not easy), but a lot of Youtube is covering gaps in documentation we used to have in abundance.

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#66

Post by jonas21 »

If you click through to the study that the Guardian based this article on [1], it looks like it was done by an SEO firm, by a Content Marketing Manager. Kind of ironic, given that it's about the quality of cited sources.

[1] https://seranking.com/blog/health-ai-overviews-youtube-vs-me...

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#67

Post by ttctciyf »

lambdaone wrote: post #55
ThinkingGuy wrote: post #47

Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by Meta) should be unsurprising.

This is absolute nonsense. Neither Google AI or YouTube are owned by Meta. What gave you the idea that they were?

Probably asked an llm

Re: Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

#70

Post by zamadatix »

delecti wrote: post #46
abixb wrote: post #14

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality. A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated o…

All of that and you're still a heavy user? Why would google change how Gemini works if you keep using it despite those issues?

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either.

I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

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