You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
They keep saying it’s impossible, when the truth is it’s just expensive.
That’s why they wont do it.
You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.
Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.
I’m addition to the other comment, I’ll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It’s more likely, but not ensured.
Yes, thank you! I think this should be written in capitals somewhere so that people could understand it quicker. The answers are not wrong or right on purpose. LLMs don’t have any way of distinguishing between the two.
That’s just not how LLMs work, bud. It doesn’t have understanding to improve, it just munges the most likely word next in line. It, as a technology, won’t advance past that level of accuracy until it’s a completely different approach.
I think you’re right that with sufficient curation and highly structured monitoring and feedback, these problems could be much improved.
I just think that to prepare an AI, in such a way, to answer any question reliably and usefully would require more human resources than there are elementary particles in the universe. We would be better off connecting live college educated human operators to Google search to individually assist people.
So I don’t know how helpful it is to say “it’s just expensive” when the entire point of AI is to be lower cost than a battalion of humans.
They could also perform some additional iterations with other models on the result to verify it, or even to enrich it; but we come back to the issue of costs.
Why not solve it before training the AI?
Simply make it clear that this tech is experimental, then provide sources and context with every result. People can make their own assessment.
The solution to the problem is to just pull the plug on the AI search bullshit until it is actually helpful.
Honestly, they could probably solve the majority of it by blacklisting Reddit from fulfilling the queries.
But I heard they paid for that data so I guess we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Don’t wait for it, usage data is valuable to them.
If you can’t fix it, then get rid of it, and don’t bring it back until we reach a time when it’s good enough to not cause egregious problems (which is never, so basically don’t ever think about using your silly Gemini thing in your products ever again)
Corps hate looking bad. Especially to shareholders. The thing is, and perhaps it doesn’t matter, most of us actually respect the step back more than we do the silly business decisions for that quarterly .5% increase in a single dot on a graph. Of course, that respect doesn’t really stop many of us from using services. Hell, I don’t like Amazon but I’ll say this: I still end up there when I need something, even if I try to not end up there in the first place. Though I do try to go to the website of the store instead of using Amazon when I can.
I miss the olden days of Google
And lose 1% valuation? Are you out of your mind?
/s
Sarcasm aside, that 1% can feed a family in a developing country, and they have 100 times that.
The corporate greed is absolutely insane.
Since when has feeding us misinformation been a problem for capitalist parasites like Pichai?
Misinformation is literally the first line of defense for them.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense. It directly devalues their offering of being able to provide you with an accurate answer to something you look for. And if their overall offering becomes less valuable, so does their ability to steer you using their results.
So while the incorrect nature is not a problem in itself for them, (as you see from his answer)… the degradation of their ability to influence results is.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked “What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that’s big.”
But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
If you don’t know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won’t refine your search. You’ll just accept the bad answer and move on.
Your logic doesn’t follow. If someone doesn’t know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won’t be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?
I don’t believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that’s not what most people expect from a search engine.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.
The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
They offer the most accurate results of search engines you’re familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that’s a low bar and sinking quick.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
Fair enough… but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I’d say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean… “put glue on your pizza” is just not that far off “drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside.”
I know I’m describing a pattern that probably wasn’t intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.
Oh don’t get me wrong I know exactly what you mean and I agree… it’s just that the LLMs are spewing actual nonsense and that breaks the whole principle of what a search engine should do… provide me accurate results.
Google isn’t bothered by incorrect results because search results are no longer their product. Constantly rising stock values are their product now. Hype is their path to those higher values.
That is actually a really good observation.
AI isn’t giving the right misinformation
Well, we can’t have that, can we?
“put glue in your tomato sauce.”
“Omg you ate a capitalist parasite spreading misinformation intentionally!”
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“put glue in your tomato sauce.”
Doesn’t sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right’s Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence… but I won’t just yet.
Can you come up with any rational explanation as to why they would do that?
Which part?
The part where it’s not “pure coincidence” but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
You mean… apart from the bog-standard propaganda regime the capitalist class has been enforcing on us long before either of us were born?
Yes, besides that. Specifically why this. Thanks.
LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.
For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.
Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google’s stock price.
It is probably the most telling demonstration of the terrible state of our current society, that one of the largest corporations on earth, which got where it is today by providing accurate information, is now happy to knowingly provide incorrect, and even dangerous information, in its own name, an not give a flying fuck about it.
Wikipedia got where it is today by providing accurate information. Google results have always been full of inaccurate information. Sorting through the links for respectable sources just became second nature, then we learned to scroll past ads to start sorting through links. The real issue with misinformation from an AI is that people treat it like it should be some infallible Oracle - a point of view only half-discouraged by marketing with a few warnings about hallucinations. LLMs are amazing, they’re just not infallible. Just like you’d check a Wikipedia source if it seemed suspect, you shouldn’t trust LLM outputs uncritically. /shrug
Google providing links to dubious websites is not the same as google directly providing dubious answers to questions.
Google is generally considered to be a trusted company. If you do a search for some topic, and google spits out a bunch of links, you can generally trust that those links are going to be somehow related to your search - but the information you find there may or may not be reliable. The information is coming from the external website, which often is some unknown untrusted source - so even though google is trusted, we know that the external information we found might not be. The new situation now is that google is directly providing bad information itself. It isn’t linking us to some unknown untrusted source but rather the supposedly trustworthy google themselves are telling us answers to our questions.
None of this would be a problem if people just didn’t consider google to be trustworthy in the first place.
I do think Perplexity does a better job. Since it cites sources in its generated response, you can easily check its answer. As to the general public trusting Google, the company’s fall from grace began in 2017, when the EU fined them like 2 billion for fixing search results. There’ve been a steady stream of controversies since then, including the revelation that Chrome continues to track you in private mode. YouTube’s predatory practices are relatively well-known. I guess I’m saying that if this is what finally makes people give up on them, no skin off my back. But I’m disappointed by how much their mismanagement seems to be adding to the pile of negativity surrounding AI.
The best part of all of this is that now Pichai is going to really feel the heat of all of his layoffs and other anti-worker policies. Google was once a respected company and place where people wanted to work. Now they’re just some generic employer with no real lure to bring people in. It worked fine when all he had to do was increase the prices on all their current offerings and stuff more ads, but when it comes to actual product development, they are hopelessly adrift that it’s pretty hilarious watching them flail.
You can really see that consulting background of his doing its work. It’s actually kinda poetic because now he’ll get a chance to see what actually happens to companies that do business with McKinsey.
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Your comment explains exactly what happens when post-expiration companies like Google try to innovate:
Let’s be realistic here, google still pays out fat salaries. That would be more than enough incentive for me. I’d take the job and ride the wave until the inevitable lay offs.
This is why it takes a lot more than fat salaries to bring a project to life. Google’s culture of innovation has been thoroughly gutted, and if they try to throw money at the problem, they’ll just attract people who are exactly like what you described: money chasers with no real product dreams.
The people who built Google actually cared about their products. They were real, true technologists who were legitimately trying to actually build something. Over time, the company became infested with incentive chasers, as exhibited by how broken their promotion ladder was for ages, and yet nothing was done about it. And with the terrible years Google has had post-COVID, all the people who really wanted to build a real company are gone. They can throw all the money they want at the problem, but chances are slim that they’ll actually be able to attract, nurture and retain the real talent that’s needed to build something real like this.
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If they backed a dump truck full of money up to my house I’d go work for them just like you. But I’d also be riding it out until the eventual layoff. What neither of us would be doing is putting in a decent amount of effort or building something cool.
Even if I wanted to work on something cool I know Google would likely release it, not maintain it, and then kill it in a few short years. So even if I was paid a ludicrous salary I wouldn’t do more than was needed, let alone build something that would drive shareholder value.
“It’s broken in horrible, dangerous ways, and we’re gonna keep doing it. Fuck you.”
you need ai if you want your stock to go up
Do you need AI or do you just need to use the term AI? Because it seems like the latter is usually enough.
Step 1. Replace CEO with AI. Step 2. Ask New AI CEO, how to fix. Step 3. Blindly enact and reinforce steps
Reddit AI says “all CEOs should be stuffed with glue pizzas”
and our parents told us Wikipedia couldn’t be trusted…
Huh. That made me stop and realize how long I’ve been around. Wikipedia still feels like a new addition to society to me, even though I’ve been using it for around 20 years now.
And what you said, is something I’ve cautioned my daughter about, and first said that to her about ten years ago.
Conservapedia to the rescue.
If you train your AI to sound right, your AI will excel at sounding right. The primary goal of LLMs is to sound right, not to be correct.
Yes, LLMs today are the ultimate “confidently incorrect” type of behavior.
So if a car maker releases a car model that randomly turns abruptly to the left for no apparent reason, you simply say “I can’t fix it, deal with it”? No, you pull it out of the market, try to fix it and, if this it is not possible, then you retire the model before it kills anyone.
I bet if there weren’t angencies forcing them to do this they wouldn’t recall.
Or you market it as a Tesla’s self driving mode
simply say “I can’t fix it, deal with it”
That’s pretty much the business model of Tech Giants and AAA game makers.
Rip up the Reddit contract and don’t use that data to train the model. It’s the definition of a garbage in garbage out problem.
Jesus. I didn’t even think of that. I could totally see that being a big part of why it is giving garbage answers.
Just imagine the average reddit, twitter, facebook, and instagram content. Then realize that half of that content is dumber than that. That’s half of what these AI models use to learn. The “smarter” half is probably filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and other types of innuendo that the AI at this stage has no chance of understanding correctly.
Reminds me of the time Microsoft unleashed their AI Twitter account and it turned into a Nazi after a couple hours. Whatever straight out of business school idiot who thought scraping the comments of the armpit of the internet was a good idea should be banned from any management position. At least it is a step up from scraping 4chan, I guess.
The glue on pizza one literally came from a Reddit post.
mithtaketh were made
Myth takes were made
This is so wild to me… as a software engineer, if my software doesn’t work 100% of the time as requested in the specification, it fails tests, doesn’t get released and I get told to fix all issues before going live.
AI is basically another word for unrealiable software full of bugs.
I mean they could disable it until it works, else it’s knowingly misleading people
Obviously you don’t have a business degree.
TBH this is surprisingly honest.
There’s really nothing they can do, that’s just the current state of LLMs. People are insane, they can literally talk with something that isn’t human. We are literally the first humans in human experience to have a human-level conversation with something that isn’t human… And they don’t like it because it isn’t perfect 4 years after release.
Using fancy predictive text is not like talking to a human level intelligence.
You’ve bought into the fad.
In terms of language, Chatgpt is more advanced than most humans. Have you spoken to the average person lately? By average I mean worldwide average.
It’s obviously not full human intelligence, but in terms of language it is pretty mind blowing.
If you think everyone around you is dumber than a text app, you might be the problem.
“a text app”… Sure, it is a text app. Definetely not revolutionizing the tech industry as we speak, totally irrelevant. Sure.
If you believe jumping on a corporate fad race bandwagon for enshittification to be “revolutionizing” I guess you’re not wrong.
Then again you also believe that people are dumber than text predictive software… So yeah. Lmao
I have never said that Chatgpt is smarter than humans, I said that when it comes to linguistics, it is more advanced than the average human.
But keep twisting my words, I don’t care. Have a wonderful rest of the week. Good bye.
ChatGPT has given me verifiably false information plenty of times. It’s amazing how it’s gets things right, but also amazing how it can get basic stuff completely wrong.
So… Humans get basic things right all the time and never provide false information? What humans are you talking to?
In terms of language, Chatgpt is more advanced than most humans.
The internet is getting flooded with content that reads like a 10th grade book report written the hour before the test. When you can give me an internet that isn’t overflowing with mindless slop that says nothing new and pictures of uncanny people smiling with too many teeth, then I might start to believe it’s better than people in some way.
In the meantime, I would encourage everyone else to maintain and encourage human connections, hand-written material and actual human interaction. Write and draw. Don’t be lazy and let your lazy brain convince yourself that any of this is making you better at anything.
Yeha, and walk everywhere. Use a boat with paddles. Don’t be lazy.
I can talk to something that’s not human all day long, the question is does that thing have qualia? Does it experience? Do my words have even the most abstract meaning to it? Most animals experience even if they don’t have language. What LLM’s are, are simply mirrors. Very complicated mirrors.
It’s fine, it’s great, it’s a step towards making actual intelligences that experience the world in some way. But don’t get swept up in this extremely premature hype over something that only looks magical because you wildly overestimate and over-essentialize the human being. Lets have some fucking humility out there in tech-bro land, even just a little. You’re not that special and the predictive text programs we’re making are not worth the reverence people are giving them. Yet.
Does it matter if it is actually experiencing things? What matters is what you experience while talking to it, not what it experiences while talking to you. When you play videogames, do you actually think the NPCs are experiencing you?
It’s pretty insane how negative people are. We did something so extraordinary. Imagine if someone told the engineers who built the space shuttle “but it isn’t teleportation”. Maybe stop being so judgemental of what others have achieved.
“Uhh actually, this isn’t a fully simulated conscious being with a fully formed organic body that resembles my biological structure on a molecular level… Get this shit out of here”
It’s pretty insane how negative people are.
It’s not negativity, it’s reigning in unwarranted faith and adoration, this is a technology, a product that is largely being made by and for corporate mega-giants who are not going to steer this towards betterment of anyone or anything, just like every other technology, it will take decades or more for any of us to see this take the form of the life changing wonder that too many people are already seeing in it. If you can stop being impressed by how easy it is to mirror human traits back at us, you will let these companies know that you do NOT want advertising AI’s in your fucking toaster.
You want the real thing? Then put some pressure where it belongs and don’t be a hype-person for advertising platforms and plagiarism simulators.
“How easy it is to blah blah blah”… Dude, what the hell are you talking about, there’s nothing easy about this system.
If they release a real AI you’d still dislike it because it was created by a corporation.
And you’re going to be waiting a suspiciously long time before your life is tangibly, positively impacted by any of this. Nothing is changing for the better any time soon, and many things are going to get worse. The carrot will always be a few years away.
The worst part is I want it to succeed and live up to it’s promises, but I am old enough to be smart enough to know that as a species, and I fucking cannot stress this enough, not that fucking special. We do the same sad shit over and over, this is tech promises that will change the world, but not soon enough to actually help because they want to make money from it. That’s the hard truth, the real pill you and all the kids watching this shit are going to have to slowly… ever so slowly… swallow.
I’m already using Copilot every single day. I love it. It helps me save so much time writing boilerplate code that can be easily guessed by the model.
It even helps me understand tools faster than the documentation. I just type a comment and it autocompletes a piece of code that is probably wrong, but probably has the APIs that I need to learn about. So I just go, learn the specific APIs, fix the details of the code and move on.
I use chatgpt to help me improve my private blog posts because I’m not a native English speaker, so it makes the text feel more fluent.
We trained a model with the documentation of our company so it automatically references docs when someone asks it questions.
I’m using the AI from Jira to automatically generate queries and find what I want as fast as possible. I used to hate searching for stuff in Jira because I never remembered the DSL.
I have GPT as a command line tool because I constantly forget commands and this tool helps me remember without having to read the help or open Google.
We have pipelines that read exceptions that would usually be confusing for developers, but GPT automatically generates an explanation for the error in the logs.
I literally ask Chatgpt questions about other areas of technology that I don’t understand. My questions aren’t advanced so I usually get the right answers and I can keep reading about the topics. Chatgpt is literally teaching me how to do front ends, something that I hated my whole career but now feels like a breeze.
Maybe you should start actually figuring out how to use the tool instead of complaining about it in this echo chamber.
This isn’t like talking to a human. It lacks depth, empathy, context, knowledge in all questions.
Just try to get more about a topic out of it, asking deeper questions. You will find that it begins writing something that might sound right or helpful but actually isn’t.
All around, it just feels artifical. No emotion, no voice patterns, no body language, no changes in behavior, no reaction to jokes. Sorry this doesn’t feel real.
Yeah, it feels like a much improved version of an Eliza. Much improved, but still software. It doesn’t understand what it’s saying. TBF though I know a few humans like that.
If nobody told you that you were talking to an AI in 2020,you’d have thought it was a person in quick interactions.
The only reason why it doesn’t feel more real is because they literally programmed it to feel the way it does. They didn’t create chatgpt to express emotions, that would be insane.
