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.”
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.
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.
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.
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.
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.
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.
AI isn’t giving the right misinformation
Well, we can’t have that, can we?
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.