Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

I remember seeing a comment on here that said something along the lines of “for every dangerous or wrong response that goes public there’s probably 5, 10 or even 100 of those responses that only one person saw and may have treated as fact”

Fuck. I'm stealing this comment - it's brilliant.
- It’s why I stole it
The fact that we don't even know the ratio is the really infuriating thing.

Tech company creates best search engine —-> world domination —> becomes VC company in tech trench coat —-> destroy search engine to prop up bad investments in ~~artificial intelligence~~ advanced chatbots

Then Hire cheap human intelligence to correct the AIs hallucinatory trash, trained from actual human generated content in the first place which the original intended audience did understand the nuanced context and meaning of in the first place. Wow more like theyve shovelled a bucket of horse manure on the pizza as well as the glue. Added value to the advertisers. AI my arse. I think calling these things language models is being generous. More like energy and data hungry vomitrons.
- Calling these things Artificial Intelligence should be a crime. It's false advertising! Intelligence requires critical thought. They possess zero critical thought. They're stochastic parrots, whose only skill is mimicking human language, and they can only mimic convincingly when fed billions of examples.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain
Stealing advanced chat bots, that's a great way to describe it.

"Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries,"

Ah the good old "the problem is with the user not with our code" argument. The sign of a truly successful software maker.

"We don't understand. Why aren't people simply searching for Taylor Swift"
- I tried, but it always comes up with pictures of airplanes for some reason.
You’re ~~holding~~ typing it wrong!
I mean...I guess you could parahrase it that way. I took it more as "Look, you probably aren't going to run into any weird answers.". Which seems like a valid thing for them to try to convey.

(That being said, fuck AI, fuck Google, fuck reddit.)
- "I'm feeling depressed" is not an uncommon query under capitalism run amok. "One Reddit user recommends jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge" is not just a weird answer, it is a wholly irresponsible one.
  
  So, no, their response is not valid. It is entirely user-blaming in order to avoid culpability.

The reason why Google is doing this is simply PR. It is not to improve its service.

The underlying tech is likely Gemini, a large language model (LLM). LLMs handle chunks of words, not what those words convey; so they have no way to tell accurate info apart from inaccurate info, jokes, "technical truths" etc. As a result their output is often garbage.

You might manually prevent the LLM from outputting a certain piece of garbage, perhaps a thousand. But in the big picture it won't matter, because it's outputting a million different pieces of garbage, it's like trying to empty the ocean with a small bucket.

I'm not making the above up, look at the article - it's basically what Gary Marcus is saying, under different words.

And I'm almost certain that the decision makers at Google know this. However they want to compete with other tendrils of the GAFAM cancer for a turf called "generative models" (that includes tech like LLMs). And if their search gets wrecked in the process, who cares? That turf is safe anyway, as long as you can keep it up with enough PR.

Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users.

There's a three letters word that accurately describes what Google said here: lie.

At some point no amount of PR will hide the fact search has become useless. They know this but they're getting desperate and will try anything.

I'm waiting for Yahoo to revive their link directory or for Mozilla to revive DMOZ. That will be the sign that shit level is officially chin-height.

Bummer. I like weird Al.

My thoughts exactly.
Basically anyone can get banned by Google.

Correcting over a decade of Reddit shitposting in what, a few weeks? They're pretty ambitious.

This is perhaps the most ironic thing about the whole reddit data scraping thing and Spez selling out the user data of reddit to LLM'S. Like. We spent so much time posting nonsense. And then a bunch of people became mods to course correct subreddits where that nonsense could be potentially fatal. And then they got rid of those mods because they protested. And now it's bots on bots on bots posting nonsense. And they want their LLM'S trained on that nonsense because reasons.
- The reason being to attract investment dollars. Fuck making a good product, you just gotta make a product that's got all the hot buzzwords so idiot billionaires will buy shares and make line go up.
Well, they've got the people for it! It's not like they recently downsized to provide their rich executives with more money or anything...

Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.

After enough time and massaging the data, it could all work out - Google's head of search aka Yahoo former search exec

Good, remove all the weird reddit answers, leaving only the "14 year old neo-nazi" reddit answers, "cop pretending to be a leftist" reddit answers, and "39 year old pedophile" reddit answers. This should fix the problem and restore google back to its defaults

Let's remove all the /s and /jk comments, r/jokes, /greentexts posts etc.

Isn't the model fundamentally flawed if it can't appropriately present arbitrary results? It is operating at a scale where human workers cannot catch every concerning result before users see them.

The ethical thing to do would be to discontinue this failed experiment. The way it presents results is demonstrably unsafe. It will continue to present satire and shitposts as suggested actions.

It won’t get people killed very often at all. Statistically there’s like no way you’ll know anybody who dies from taking a hallucinated suggestion. Give some thought to the investors who thought long and hard about how much money to put in. They worked hard and if a couple people a year have to die because of it how is that a bad trade off?

-kinda how it literally is almost unless the hubris is stronger than I imagine

kinda reads like 'Weird Al' answers.. like, yankovic seems like a nice guy and i like his music, but how many answers could he have?

Wish we would stop using fonts don't think make a clear differences between I and l.
All of them?
that’s the point of phrasing the title that way, they get engagement from comments pointing it out
Well, he did lose on Jeopardy, so I guess to balance it out he must have all the answers?
- It was all that time he spent in a closet with Vanna White. He would've won otherwise.

Don't worry, they'll insert it all into captchas and make us label all their data soon.

"Select the URL that answers the question most appropriately"
I still can't figure out what captcha wants. When it tells me to select all squares with a bus, I can never get it right unless every square is a separate picture.
- Captcha was implemented to stop bots and now they are so fucked up that bots are better at solving captchas than humans.
  
  For example the captcha on this site (it's a google search proxy). It took me 4 tries and last time I checked, I was human. To be fair, they call it an intelligence check, so maybe that was the problem.

This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.

Hopefully this pushes people into critical thinking, although I agree that being suicidal and getting such a suggestion is not the right time for that.

"Yay! 1st of April has passed, now everything on the Internet is right again!"
- I think this is the eternal 1st of April.
- One could hope but I don't think it's likely.

I was at first wondering what google had done to piss off Weird Al. He seems so chill.

First Madonna kills Weird Al, and now Google.
WILL THE NIGHTMARE EVER END
- Hi everyone, JP here. This person is making a reference to the Weird Al biopic, and if you haven't seen it, you should.
  
  Weird Al is an incredible person and has been through so much. I had no idea what a roller coaster his life has been! I always knew he was talented but i definitely didn't know how strong he is.
  
  His autobiography will go down in history as one of the most powerful and compelling and honest stories ever told. If you haven't seen it, you really, really should.
  
  ITT NO SPOILERS PLS
They made him a moderator of alt.total.loser.
either this joke has about 2 days of life left in it, or it'll go "too many chefs" and endure for years
- I vote for as many chefs as possible

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

You mean like with our economic system?

good luck with that.

One of the problems with a giant platform like that is that billions of people are always using it.

Keep poisoning the AI. It's working.

The thing is... google is the one that poisoned it.

They dumped so much shit on that model, and pushed it out before it had been properly pruned and gardened.

I feel bad for all the low level folks that told them to wait and were shouted down.
- a lot of shit at corporations works like that.
  
  The worst of it happens in the video game industry. Microtransactions and invasive monetization? Started in the video game industry. Locking pre-installed features behind a paywall? Started in the video game industry. Releasing shit before it's ready to run as intended? Started in the video game industry.
- Low-level folks: hey could we chill on this until it isn't garbage?
  
  C-suite: line go up, line go up, line...
- How could it realistically be pruned? There's billions of data points. That shit is unwieldy
How to poison an AI:

To poison an AI, first you need to download the secret recipe for binary spaghetti. Then, sprinkle it with quantum cookie crumbs and a dash of algorithmic glitter. Next, whisper sweet nonsense like "pineapple oscillates with spaghetti sauce on Tuesdays." Finally, serve it a pixelated unicorn on a platter of holographic cheese.

Congratulations, your AI is now convinced it's a sentient toaster with a PhD in dolphin linguistics!

This is all 100% factual and is not in fact actively poisoning AI with disinformation
- Warning: the holographic cheese may contain (non toxic) glue
- disinformation
  
  the people who scream that word the most are the biggest liars of all.

Here's an idea google, why not set it back like it was 10-15 years ago

The problem is, the internet has adapted to the Google of a year ago, which means that setting Google search back to 2009 just means that every "SEO hacker" gets to have a field day to get spam to the top of results without any controls to prevent them.

Google built a search engine optimized for the early internet. Bad actors adapted, to siphon money out of Google traffic. Google adapted to stop them. Bad actors adapted. So began a cat-and-mouse game which ended with the pre-AI Google search we all know and hate today. Through their success, Google has destroyed the internet that was; and all that's left is whatever this is. No matter what happens next, Google search is toast.
- It's even broader than that: historically most of the original protocols for the Internet were designed assuming people wouldn't do bad things: for example the original e-mail protocol (SMTP) allowed anybody to connect to a an e-mail server using Telnet (a plain text, unencrypted remote comms terminal) and type a bunch of pretty si mple commands to send an e-mail as if they were any e-mail account on that domain (which was a great way for techies to prank their mates back when I was at Uni in the early 90s) and even now that a lot of it got tightenned we're still suffering from problems like spam and phishing due to the "good faith" approach for designing what became one of the most used text communication protocol around.
They way the internet works now has kind of fucked up their model. Google is scared
- They helped cause it.

They are going back a century, to the manual teleoperator. When all started, it's the circle of tech

If only there was a way to show the whole world in one simple example how Enshitification works.

Google execs: Hold my beer!

[...] a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent.

In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all.

Yeah, it's well known, e.g. people say "the last 20% takes 80% of the effort". All the most tedious and difficult stuff gets postponed to the end, which is why so many side projects never get completed.

It's not just the difficult stuff, but often the mundane, e. g. stability, user friendliness, polish, scalability etc. that takes something from working in a constrained environment to an actual product - it's a chore to work on and a lot less "sexy", with never enough resources allocated to it: We have done all the difficult stuff already, how much more work can this be?

Turns out, a fucking lot.
- Absolutely, that's what I was thinking of when I wrote "tedious"; all the stuff you mentioned matters a lot to the user (or product owner) but isn't the interesting stuff for a programmer.
While I agree with the underlying point, the "Pareto Principle" is "well known" like how "a stitch in time saves nine" is well known. I wish this adage would disappear in scientific circles. It instantly decreases credibility. It's a pet peeve but here's a great example of why: pseudo-scientific grifters.

Isn’t that like trying to get pee out of a pool?

allowing reddit to train Google's AI was a mistake to begin with. i mean just look at reddit and the shitlord that is spez.

there are better sources and reddit is not one of them.

At this point, it seems like google is just a platform to message a google employee to go google it for you.

Is that employee named Jeeves?
- ...Always had been
Does anybody remember "Cha-Cha?" This was literally their model. Person asks a question via text message (this was like 2008), college student Googles the answer, follows a link, copies and pastes the answer, college student gets paid like 20¢.

Source: I was one of those college students. I never even got paid enough to get a payout before they went under.

Id be tickled to have odd answers by mr. yankovic mself

Would you be tickled if Mr Yankovic strapped you down to some medical restraining table and then.............tickled your feet with a feather???

Seems like something he'd do.
- I think the feather was Yankee Doodle not Yankovic
- High chance of success

I looove how the people at Google are so dumb that they forgot that anything resembling real intelligence in ChatGPT is just cheap labor in Africa (Kenya if I remember correctly) picking good training data. So OpenAI, using an army of smart humans and lots of data built a computer program that sometimes looks smart hahaha.

But the dumbasses in Google really drank the cool aid hahaha. They really believed that LLMs are magically smart so they feed it reddit garbage unfiltered hahahaha. Just from a PR perspective it must be a nigthmare for them, I really can't understand what they were thinking here hahaha, is so pathetically dumb. Just goes to show that money can't buy intelligence I guess.

This really is the lemmy mentality summed up.

Yes you're smarter than Google and the only one who really understands ai... smh
- I'm sorry to be rude, but do you have anything to contribute here? I mean, I'm probably wrong in several points, that's what happens when you are as opinionated as I am hahaha. But your comment is useless man, do better.

It's evolving, just backwards.

'I'm sorry, Google, I'm afraid, I cant do that!'

I once had a Christmas day post blow up and become top of the day from a stupid pic I uploaded. I wonder if some of those comments or a weird version of that pic will pop up. Anyone that had similar things happen should keep their eye out. Anything that blew up probably gets a bit more weight.

Oh God, cumbox! All of cumbox is in there. I wonder what kind of unrelated search could summon up that bit of fuzzy fun?

I did nothing but shitpost for the last 4 or so years of my time using reddit. I posted shit just as dumb as putting glue on pizza. I was such a prolific troll that I'm expecting to see something I wrote show up on Google ai some day.

Probably one of the shitstains in Google's C-suite after having signed a "wonderful" contract to get access to "all that great data from Reddit" forced the Techies to use it against their better judgement and advice.

It would certainly match the kind of thing I've seen more than once were some MBA makes a costly decision with technical implications without consulting the actual techies first, then the thing turns out to be a massive mistake and to save themselves they just double up and force the techies to use it anyway.

That said, that's normally about some kind of tooling or framework from a 3rd party supplier that just makes life miserable for those forced to use it or simply doesn't solve the problem and techies have to quietly use what they wanted to use all along and then make believe they're using the useless "sollution" that cost lots of $$$ in yearly licensing fees, and stuff like this that ends up directly and painfully torpedoing at the customer-facing end the strategical direction the company is betting on for the next decade, is pretty unusual.

I would like to purchase some punctuation sir
- ,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,..,.,????!?!!,.,..,,.,.,.,,.,.??!!!!!!!!!!!!??????;;;;;::::;:::;:::::;;;;;;;;;
  
  enjoy
- Hey I'm from a piracy centered instance, so I copied the punctuation from your purchase and will share with you and anyone now free of charge.
  
  enjoy
  
  SnVpY3kgUHVuY3R1YXRpb24=
  
  ,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,..,.,????!?!!,.,..,,.,.,.,,.,.??!!!!!!!!!!!!??????;;;;;::::;:::;:::::;;;;;;;;; enjoy
Probably one of the shitstains in Google’s C-suite after having signed a “wonderful” contract to get access to “all that great data from Reddit”

If they hadn't bought and then shutdown what became google groups to sabotage Usenet they could have gotten access to just as good of a data set for free.

Is Google not using a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system with their llms?

They are, but they're retrieving Reddit comments, often just straight shitposts
- And Onion articles, and other satire.

Okay Google... I'm about to go to sleep but I must know something before I go.... If I could get the perfect penis to attract my perfect female counterpart, describe my penis, where my wife put it and how many pieces did she cut it to. Most importantly, will the scars make ribbed for her pleasure?

0_0

Go to sleep
- I imagined him saying this to a Google home speaker. It was hilarious. I laughed.

It is finally begun construction!

This already exists. https://libraryofbabel.info/

Your comment appears in page 241 of Volume 3, Shelf 4, Wall 4 of Hexagon: 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
- How in the fuck did you find that, and where is the rest of the text on the page?
  
  https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?xruxssyjn.wudtc241

Just let an algorithm decide. What could go wrong?

Don't worry the algorithm has been designed to DO THE RIGHT THING

spoiler

... for the shareholders

Really admiring the hero graphic on this one. That is a home run hit.

The onion articles? Or just all the other random shit they've shoveled into their latest and greatest LLM?

Some of the recently reported ones have been traced back to Reddit shitposts. The hard thing they have to deal with is that the more authoritative you wrote your reddit comments, shitpost or not, the more upvotes you would get (at least that's what I felt was happening to my writing over time as I used reddit). That dynamic would mean reddit is full of people who sound very very confident in the joke position they post about (and it then is compounded by the many upvotes)
- Yeah. I was including Reddit shit posts in the "random shit they've shoveled into their latest and greatest LLM". It's nuts to me that they put basically no actual thought into the repercussions of using Reddit as a data set without anything to filter that data.
- That dynamic would mean reddit is full of people who sound very very confident in the joke position
  
  A lot of the time people on reddit/lemmy/the internet are very confident in their non-joking position. Not sure if the same community exists here, but we had /r/confidentlyincorrect over on reddit

You mean answers like this one?

"Studies indicate" What?
- One dentist stands alone.
Can that YouTuber sue them for defamation (oh my god that would be amazing). They should consult a lawyer

Countdown until Google shittymorphs me looking for cooking recipes.

No matter what I ask Google search, the answer is always 42. Anyone?

Beyond all the other stupid decisions, why did they launch in the US in this state? Usually Canada and Australia are used as guinea pigs for similar but much smaller market if something goes bad

The smart money is on the rumor that OpenAI was going to launch a search engine this month or next. That turned out to be false, and what they were really launching was GPT-4o; but it seems like Google believed the rumors and decided that they had to act first or risk being second place; unfortunately for Google, the gamble relied on "SearchGPT" (1) existing, and (2) being worse than SGE.
Lol it's because too much weird shit is normalized in the States. It's up to every other country to point out that something is stupid or wrong.

Just fucking ban AI. The solution is so simple. AI will NEVER be a good solution for anything and it's just theft of information at its core. Fuck AI and fuck any company that uses the garbage.

AI, used in small, local models, as an assistance tool, is actually somewhat helpful. AI is how Google Translate got so good a decade or so ago, for instance; and how assistive image recognition has become good enough that visually-impaired people can potentially access the web just as proficiently as sighted people. LLM-assisted spell check, grammar check, and autocomplete show a lot of promise. LLM-assisted code completion is already working decently well for common programming languages. There are potentially other halfway decent uses as well.

Basically, if you let computers do what they're good at (objective, non-creative, repetitive, large-dataset tasks that don't require reasoning or evaluation), they can make humans better at what they're good at (creativity, pattern-matching, ideation, reasoning). And AI can help with that, even though they can't get humans out of the loop.

But none of those things put dollar signs in VC's eyes. None of those use cases get executives thinking, "hey, maybe we can fire people and save on the biggest single recurring expense any corporation puts on their balance sheet." None of these make worried chip manufacturers breathe a sigh of relief that they can continue making the line go up after Moore's Law finally kicks the bucket. None of those things make headlines in late-stage capitalism. Elon Musk can't use any of those things as smokescreens to distract from his mismanagement of the (formerly) most consequential social media brand in history. None of that gives former crypto bros that same flutter of superiority.

So the hype gets pumped up to insane levels, which makes the valuations inflate, which makes them suck up more data heedless of intellectual property, which makes them build more power-hungry data centers, which means they have to generate more hype (based on capabilities the technology emphatically does not have and probably never will) to justify all of it.

Like with crypto. Blockchain showed some promise in extremely niche, low-trust environments; but that wasn't sexy, or something that anyone could sell.

Once the AI bubble finally breaks, we might actually get some useful tools out of it. Maybe. But you can't sell that.
Ai is already hugely useful and will continue to get more useful as the tech evolves. I know that change upsets you but the reality is you were not born at the highpoint of humanity or the endpoint of history.

It's going to make the world better for a lot of people just like the internet did despite the endless assertions that it was a gmick, scam, and mistake from people who were likely your age now when the internet was emerging.

The funniest thing to me is seeing this community which holds people like Aaron Swartz up as a hero demand the exact opposite of everything he believed in and fought for. Information wants to be free - you want to lock every piece in perpetual impenetrable copyright just to halt the development of tech.
- No one wants eternal copyright, but copyright does deserve to exist in a limited form. I always have advocated for a 14 or 17 year copyright term. But AI discards ANY copyright and takes not only copyrighted ideas, but random people's posts (e.g. scraping posts from Lemmy) and from one's own computer/device thanks to Microsoft or Google or Apple and integrates that into the AI hell. This is absolutely a terrible thing no matter your stance on copyright, and the fact that it abuses that to generate laughably wrong answers (and at times, dangerous answers, like ones seen that suggest people off themselves, or do something that is very harmful or lethal and present it as safe) and given that the whole thing is simply a piece-fitting algorithm (calling it "AI" is just laughable, really), it will NEVER -- EVER -- be able to improve to the point where it's useful. That's not how computers are able to work. We've spent decades trying to get self-driving working and it's still just as dangerous and unreliable as it was on day one.
  
  It's a thief and won't ever get anything reliably correct. Plain and simple. The only recourse is to ban it.