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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

#71

Post by geuis »

Hey Google. Here's a really stupid idea.

Knock it off.

Your core search result product has gotten increasingly worse and less reliable over at least the last 5 years. YouTube's search results are nearly unusable.

I can't imagine almost any external customer is asking for the AI bullshit thing that's just being shovelwared into everything Alphabet product now.

I just noticed a couple days ago the gmail iOS app now does the same predictive completion that Copilot tries to do when I'm working. It's annoying as hell and I can't find how or if I can turn it off.

Stop bullshitting around with ruining your products and get back to making money by making accessing information easier and more accurate.

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

#72

Post by kredd »

thesimp wrote: post #37

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

It’s a bit weird since Google is taking over the “burden of proof”-like liability. Up until now, once user clicked on a search result, they mentally judged the website’s credibility, not Google’s. Now every user will judge whether data coming from Google is reliable or not, which is a big risk to take on, in my opinion.

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

#74

Post by dgellow »

krapp wrote: post #52
SoftTalker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> putting glue on pizza to hold the cheese on It's actually not the dumbest idea I've heard from a real person. So no surprise it might be suggested by an AI that was trained on data from real people.

It wasn't an idea, though. It was a joke someone made on Reddit. If an AI can't tell the difference, it shouldn't be responsible for posting answers as authoritative.

Insane people at Google thought it would be a good idea to let Reddit of all places drive their AI search responses

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

#75

Post by namaria »

smashed wrote: post #61
benrutter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So 100% accurate can't be the goal. Obviously the goal is to get the responses to be less obviously stupid. I'm not sure I agree. I think you're right that 100% accuracy is potentially unfeasable as a realistic aim, but I think the question is how accurate something needs to be in order to be a useful proposition for search. AI that's as knowledgable as I am is a good achievement and helpful for a lot of use cases,…

The problem is that in all the shared examples, Google ai search does not respond with a Maybe xyz, question mark? like you did. It always answers with high confidence and can't seem to navigate any gray area where there are multiple differing opinions or opposing source of truths.

Yeah the "manipulating language cogently is intelligence" premise that underlines this "AI" cycle is proving itself wrong in a grand way.

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

#76

Post by shombaboor »

kredd wrote: post #72
thesimp wrote: post #37

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

It’s a bit weird since Google is taking over the “burden of proof”-like liability. Up until now, once user clicked on a search result, they mentally judged the website’s credibility, not Google’s. Now every user will judge whether data coming from Google is reliable or not, which is a big risk to take on, in my opinion.

they went from "look at this dumbass on reddit" to "no it is I (Google) who is in fact the dumbass". It's an interesting strategy to say the least.

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

#78

Post by zihotki »

thesimp wrote: post #37

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

They spent 10 years finetuning the search and then another 15 finetuning ads and clicks. Google's business is ads, not search.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

typpo wrote: post #70
thesimp wrote: post #37

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

The problem in this case is not that it was trained on bad data. The AI summaries are just that - summaries - and there are bad results that it faithfully summarizes. This is an attempt to reduce hallucinations coming full circle. A simple summarization model was meant to reduce hallucination risk, but now it's not discerning enough to exclude untruthful results from the summary.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by x0x0 »

thesimp wrote: post #37

I'm actually shocked that a company that has spent 25 years on finetuning search results for any random question people ask in the searchbox does not have a good, clean, dataset to train an LLM on. Maybe this is the time to get out the old Encyclopedia Britannica CD and use that for training input.

I don't think it's true at all.

Two reasons. The first, even ignoring that truth isn't necessarily widely agreed (is Donald Trump a raping fraud?), is that truth changes over time. eg is Donald Trump president? And presidents are the easiest case because we all know a fixed point in time when that is recalculated.

Second, Google's entire business model is built around spending nothing on content. Building clean pristinely labeled training sets is an extremely expensive thing to do at scale. Google has been in the business of stealing other people's data. Just one small example: if you produced (very expensive at scale) clean, multiple views, well lit photographs of your products for sale they would take those photos and show them on links to other people's stores; and if you didn't like that, they would kick you out of their shopping search. etc etc. Paying to produce content upends their business model. See eg the 5-10% profit margin well run news orgs have vs the 25% tech profit margin Google has even after all the money blown on moonshots.

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