You must log in or register to comment.
It blows my mind that these companies think AI is good as an informative resource. The whole point of generative text AIs is the make things up based on its training data. It doesn’t learn, it generates. It’s all made up, yet they want to slap it on a search engine like it provides factual information.
They give zero fucks about their customers, they just want to pump that stock price so their RSUs vest.
This stuff could give you incurable highly viral brain cancer that would eliminate the human race and they’d spend millions killing the evidence.
True, and it’s excellent at generating basic lists of things. But you need a human to actually direct it.
Having Google just generate whatever text is like just mashing the keys on a typewriter. You have tons of perfectly formed letters that mean nothing. They make no sense because a human isn’t guiding them.
It’s like the difference between being given a grocery list from your mum and trying to remember what your mum usually sends you to the store for.
… Or calling your aunt and having her yell things at you that she thinks might be on your Mum’s shopping list.
That could at least be somewhat useful… It’s more like grabbing some random stranger and asking what their aunt thinks might be on your mum’s shopping list.
… but only one word at a time. So you end up with:
- Bread
- Cheese
- Cow eggs
- Chicken milk
Yeah, I use ChatGPT fairly regularly for work. For a reminder of the syntax of a method I used a while ago, and for things like converting JSON into a class (which is trivial to do, but using chatGPT for this saves me a lot of typing) it works pretty good.
But I’m not using it for precise and authoritative information, I’m going to a search engine to find a trustworthy site for that.
Putting the fuzzy, usually close enough (but sometimes not!) answers at the top when I’m looking for a site that’ll give me a concrete answer is just mixing two different use cases for no good reason. If google wants to get into the AI game they should have a separate page from the search page for that.
Yeah it’s damn good for translating between languages, or things that are simple in concept but drawn out in execution.
Used it the other day to translate a complex EF method syntax statement into query syntax. It got it mostly right, did need some tweaking, but it saved me about 10 minutes of humming and hawing to make sure I did it correctly (honestly I don’t use query syntax often.)
I mean, it does learn, it just lacks reasoning, common sense or rationality.
What it learns is what words should come next, with a very complex a nuanced way if deciding that can very plausibly mimic the things that it lacks, since the best sequence of next-words is very often coincidentally reasoned, rational or demonstrating common sense. Sometimes it’s just lies that fit with the form of a good answer though.I’ve seen some people work on using it the right way, and it actually makes sense. It’s good at understanding what people are saying, and what type of response would fit best. So you let it decide that, and give it the ability to direct people to the information they’re looking for, without actually trying to reason about anything. It doesn’t know what your monthly sales average is, but it does know that a chart of data from the sales system filtered to your user, specific product and time range is a good response in this situation.
The only issue for Google insisting on jamming it into the search results is that their entire product was already just providing pointers to the “right” data.
What they should have done was left the “information summary” stuff to their role as “quick fact” lookup and only let it look at Wikipedia and curated lists of trusted sources (mayo clinic, CDC, national Park service, etc), and then given it the ability to ask clarifying questions about searches, like “are you looking for product recalls, or recall as a product feature?” which would then disambiguate the query.
It really depends on the type of information that you are looking for. Anyone who understands how LLMs work, will understand when they’ll get a good overview.
I usually see the results as quick summaries from an untrusted source. Even if they aren’t exact, they can help me get perspective. Then I know what information to verify if something relevant was pointed out in the summary.
Today I searched something like “Are owls endangered?”. I knew I was about to get a great overview because it’s a simple question. After getting the summary, I just went into some pages and confirmed what the summary said. The summary helped me know what to look for even if I didn’t trust it.
It has improved my search experience… But I do understand that people would prefer if it was 100% accurate because it is a search engine. If you refuse to tolerate innacurate results or you feel your search experience is worse, you can just disable it. Nobody is forcing you to keep it.
I think the issue is that most people aren’t that bright and will not verify information like you or me.
They already believe every facebook post or ragebait article. This will sadly only feed their ignorance and solidify their false knowledge of things.
The same people who didn’t understand that Google uses a SEO algorithm to promote sites regardless of the accuracy of their content, so they would trust the first page.
If people don’t understand the tools they are using and don’t double check the information from single sources, I think it’s kinda on them. I have a dietician friend, and I usually get back to him after doing my “Google research” for my diets… so much misinformation, even without an AI overview. Search engines are just best effort sources of information. Anyone using Google for anything of actual importance is using the wrong tool, it isn’t a scholar or research search engine.
you can just disable it
This is not actually true. Google re-enables it and does not have an account setting to disable AI results. There is a URL flag that can do this, but it’s not documented and requires a browser plugin to do it automatically.
And this technology is what our executive overlords want to replace human workers with, just so they can raise their own compensation and pay the remaining workers even less
This is the kind of shit that makes Idiocracy the most weirdly prophetic movie I’ve ever seen.
Ignoring the blatant eugenics of the very first scene, I’d rather live in the idiocracy world because at least the president with all of his machismo and grandstanding was still humble enough to put the smartest guy in the room in charge of actually getting plants to grow.
My take away from that was the poorly educated had more kids.
Giving the benefit of the doubt I can see that reading but it definitely implied that stupidity is genetic because of how big the stupid people family tree gets and the scifi story it was based on was a looooot more explicit with the eugenics of the story.
So much this. The whole point is to annihilate entire sectors of decent paying jobs. That’s why “AI” is garnering all this investment. Exactly like Theranos. Doesn’t matter if their product worked, or made any goddamned sense at all really. Just the very idea of nuking shitloads of salaries is enough to get the investor class to dump billions on the slightest chance of success.
Exactly like Theranos
Is it though? This one is an idea that can literally destroy the economic system. Seems different to ignore that detail.
Current gen AI can’t come close to destroying the economy. It’s the most overhyped technology I’ve ever seen in my life.
You’re missing the point. They aim to replace most/all jobs. For that to be possible, it will need investment, and to get a lot better. If that happens, a worldwide inability to make a living will happen. It likely will have negative impact even on the rich bastards.
There’s an upper ceiling on capability though, and we’re pretty close to it with LLMs. True artificial intelligence would change the world drastically, but LLMs aren’t the path to it.
Yeah, I never said this is going to happen. All I was commenting on is how it’s ironic that the people investing in destroying jobs are too myopic to realize that would be bad for them too.
They always miss this part. It’s (part of) why the Republicans wanting to be Russian-style oligarchs is so insane. And ignoring good faith government and their disregard for the rule of law.
Do they KNOW what happens to Russian oligarchs? Why do they think they’re immune to that part of it? Do they really want the cutthroat politics of places like Russia and Africa, where they constantly have to watch their backs?
These people already have money. Their aims, if achieved, will not make their lives better.
Many years ago the people who ruled this country figured out that the best thing for them was to spread power and have most civilians in good health. Government by committee and good faith government is less about ethical treatment of citizens (though I appreciate the side effect) and more about protecting the committee and/or the would be dictator.
Ah, I misunderstood then, sorry. But still, even with all the investment in the world, LLM is a bubble waiting to burst. I have a hunch we will see truly world-altering technology in the next ~20 years (the kind that’d put huge swathes of people out of work, as you describe), but this ain’t it.
I am starting to think google put this up on purpose to destroy people’s opinion on AI. They are so much behind Open AI that they would benefit from it.
I doubt there’s any sort of 4D chess going on, instead of the whole thing being brought about by short-sighted executives who feel like they have to do something to show that they’re still in the game exactly because they’re so much behind "Open"AI
It is possible to happen without any 4D chess thinking, they try, they realize that they failed, but they realize that they win here either way.
This shit is so bad that even a blind guy can see it.
This shit is so bad that even a blind guy can see it.
You severely underestimate the shortsightedness of the executive class. They’re usually so convinced of their infallibility that they absolutely will make decisions that are obviously terrible to anyone looking in from the outside
deleted by creator
Yes, because this whole thing is incredible stupid, that how could they not see it? Saying of course is that “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence”, but holy shit how incompetent this 2 trillion dollar company was.
yeah, I honestly am expecting to die in a camp at this point.
This combined with the meteoric rise of fascism absolutely leave me thinking that I’ll probably end up in a concentration camp
Hope for the best but prepare for the worst!
These are the subtle types of errors that are much more likely to cause problems than when it tells someone to put glue in their pizza.
You’re giving humans too much in the sense of intelligence…there are people who literally drove in lakes because a GPS told them to…
Obviously you need hot glue for pizza, not the regular stuff.
It do be keepin the cheese from slidin off onto yo lap tho
Wait… why can’t we put glue on pizza anymore?
because the damn liberals canceled glue on pizza!
How else are the toppings supposed to stay in place?
Yes its totally ok to reuse fish tank tubing for grammy’s oxygen mask
Are AI products released by a company liable for slander? 🤷🏻
I predict we will find out in the next few years.
So, maybe?
I’ve seen some legal experts talk about how Google basically got away from misinformation lawsuits because they weren’t creating misinformation, they were giving you search results that contained misinformation, but that wasn’t their fault and they were making an effort to combat those kinds of search results. They were talking about how the outcome of those lawsuits might be different if Google’s AI is the one creating the misinformation, since that’s on them.
Yeah the Air Canada case probably isn’t a big indicator on where the legal system will end up on this. The guy was entitled to some money if he submitted the request on time, but the reason he didn’t was because the chatbot gave the wrong information. It’s the kind of case that shouldn’t have gotten to a courtroom, because come on, you’re supposed to give him the money any it’s just some paperwork screwup caused by your chatbot that created this whole problem.
In terms of someone someone getting sick because they put glue on their pizza because google’s AI told them to… we’ll have to see. They may do the thing where “a reasonable person should know that the things an AI says isn’t always fact” which will probably hold water if google keeps a disclaimer on their AI generated results.
At the least it should have a prominent “for entertainment purposes only”, except it fails that purpose, too
I think the image generators are good for generating shitposts quickly. Best use case I’ve found thus far. Not worth the environmental impact, though.
Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
- J. Jonah Jameson
That’s ok, ChatGPT can talk now.
They’re going to fight tooth and nail to do the usual: remove any responsibility for what their AI says and does but do everything they can to keep the money any AI error generates.
Tough question. I doubt it though. I would guess they would have to prove mal intent in some form. When a person slanders someone they use a preformed bias to promote oneself while hurting another intentionally. While you can argue the learned data contained a bias, it promotes itself by being a constant source of information that users can draw from and therefore make money and it would in theory be hurting the company. Did the llm intentionally try to hurt the company would be the last bump. They all have holes. If I were a judge/jury and you gave me the decisions I would say it isn’t beyond a reasonable doubt.
Slander/libel nothing. It’s going to end up killing someone.
If you’re a start up I guarantee it is
Big tech… I’ll put my chips in hell no
Yet another nail in the coffin of rule of law.
🤑🤑🤑🤑
I’ve had similar issues with copilot where it seemingly pulls information out of it’s ass. I use it to do fact-finding about services the company I work for is considering and even when I specify “use only information found on whateveritis.com” it still occasionally gives an answer I can’t verify in their docs. Still better than manually searching a bunch of knowledge articles myself but it is annoying.
Remember when Google used to give good search results?
Like a decade ago?
I wish infoseek was still around
Just don’t use google
Why people still use it is beyond me.
Because Google has literally poisoned the internet to be the de facto SEO optimization goal. Even if Google were to suddenly disappear, everything is so optimized forngoogle’s algorithm that any replacements are just going to favor the SEO already done by everyone.
The abusive adware company can still sometimes kill it with vague searches.
(Still too lazy to properly catalog the daily occurrences such as above.)
SearXNG proxying Google still isn’t as good sometimes for some reason (maybe search bubbling even in private browsing w/VPN). Might pay for search someday to avoid falling back to Google.
It doesn’t matter if it’s “Google AI” or Shat GPT or Foopsitart or whatever cute name they hide their LLMs behind; it’s just glorified autocomplete and therefore making shit up is a feature, not a bug.
Chatgpt was in much higher quality a year ago than it is now.
It could be very accurate. Now it’s hallucinating the whole time.
I was thinking the same thing. LLMs have suddenly got much worse. They’ve lost the plot lmao
That’s because of the concerted effort to sabotage LLMs by poisoning their data.
I’m not sure thats definitely true… my sense is that the AI money/arms race has made them push out new/more as fast as possible so they can be the first and get literally billions of investment capitol
Maybe. I’m sure there’s more than one reason. But the negativity people have for AI is really toxic.
deleted by creator
People aren’t being critical. At least most are. They’re just being haters tbh. But we can argue this till the cows come home, and it’s not gonna change either of our minds, so let’s just not.
is it?
nearly everyone I speak to about it (other than one friend I have who’s pretty far on the spectrum) concur that no one asked for this. few people want any of it, its consuming vast amounts of energy, is being shoehorned into programs like skype and adobe reader where no one wants it, is very, very soon to become manditory in OS’s like windows, iOS and Android while it threatens election integrity already (mosdt notibly India) and is being used to harass individuals with deepfake porn etc.
the ethics board at openAI got essentially got dispelled and replaced by people interested only in the fastest expansion and rollout possible to beat the competition and maximize their capitol gains…
…also AI “art”, which is essentially taking everything a human has ever made, shredding it into confetti and reconsstructing it in the shape of something resembling the prompt is starting to flood Image search with its grotesque human-mimicing outputs like things with melting, split pupils and 7 fingers…
you’re saying people should be positive about all this?
You’re cherry picking the negative points only, just to lure me into an argument. Like all tech, there’s definitely good and bad. Also, the fact that you’re implying you need to be “pretty far on the spectrum” to think this is good is kinda troubling.
The only people poisoning the data set are the makers who insist on using Reddit content
Making shit up IS a feature of LLMs. It’s crazy to use it as search engine. Now they’ll try to stop it from hallucinating to make it a better search engine and kill the one thing it’s good at …
Maybe they should branch it off. Have one for making shit up purposes and one for search engine. I haven’t found the need for one that makes shit up but have gotten value using them to search. Especially with Google going to shit and so many websites being terribly designed and hard to navigate.
And this is what the rich will replace us with.
Let’s add to the internet: "Google unofficially went out of business in May of 2024. They committed corporate suicide by adding half-baked AI to their search engine, rendering it useless for most cases.
When that shows up in the AI, at least it will be useful information.
If you really believe Google is about to go out of business, you’re out of your mind
Looks like we found the AI…
I don’t bother using things like Copilot or other AI tools like ChatGPT. I mean, they’re pretty cool what they CAN give you correctly and the new demo floored me in awe.
But, I prefer just using the image generators like DALL E and Diffusion to make funny images or a new profile picture on steam.
But this example here? Good god I hope this doesn’t become the norm…
These text generation LLM are good for text generating. I use it to write better emails or listings or something.
I had to do a presentation for work a few weeks ago. I asked co-pilot to generate me an outline for a presentation on the topic.
It spat out a heading and a few sections with details on each. It was generic enough, but it gave me the structure I needed to get started.
I didn’t dare ask it for anything factual.
Worked a treat.
You can ask these LLMs to continue filling out the outline too. They just generate a bunch of generic points and you can erase or fill in the details.
That’s how I used it to write cover letters for job applications. I feed it my resume and the job listing and it puts something together. I’ve got to do a lot of editing and sometimes it just makes up experience, but it’s faster than trying to write it myself.
This is definitely different from using Dall-E to make funny images. I’m on a thread in another forum that is (mostly) dedicated to AI images of Godzilla in silly situations and doing silly things. No one is going to take any advice from that thread apart from “making Godzilla do silly things is amusing and worth a try.”
Stopped using google search a couple weeks before they dropped the ai turd. Glad i did
What do you use now?
I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.
Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.
Duckduckgo, kagi, and Searxng are the ones i hear about the most
DDG is basically a (supposedly) privacy-conscious front-end for Bing. Searxng is an aggregator. Kagi is the only one of those three that uses its own index. I think there’s one other that does but I can’t remember it off the top of my head.
Not who you asked but I also work IT support and Kagi has been great for me.
I started with their free trial set of searches and that solidified it.
Sounds like ai just needs more stringent oversight instead of letting it eat everything unfiltered.
So uhh… why aren’t companies suing the shit out of Google?
I’m using &udm=14 for now…
Why go out of your way instead of just using a proper search engine? Google has been getting worse and worse for the past 4 or 5 years
Can you tell folks here what these “proper search engines” are because I can think of like five off the top of my head that all have issues similar to Google’s. Yes, that includes paid search engine Kagi.
Almost all of them have similar issues except the self-hosted ones, which are a little beyond most people’s basic capabilities.
DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It’s free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG’s results became generally more useful than Google’s or Bing’s. (That’s my personal experience; YMMV.) And they’re not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).
If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here’s what Kagi’s “quick answer” feature gives me with this search term:
Room for improvement, sure, but it’s not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That’s the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.
I stopped recommending kagi on lemmy after the umpteenth person accused me of shilling.
Maybe I should take a screenshot of the £20 leaving my account each month!
My issue is the Kagi CEO who won’t take “No” for an answer and thinks he can just browbeat people over the head with his ideas until they agree with him.
He gives me every fucking reason to not give them a fucking penny because he reminds me all too well of people I have very good reason to not fucking trust.
That’s not an unreasonable reason not to subscribe.
I do have a bit of a fear that the company may hit a turning point. And he’ll either tone it down a bit, or they’ll lose a lot of people, both staff and subs.
I am pretty content with DuckDuckGo at the moment. It’s sadly still worse than peak Google was but that’s enshittification for ya
DDG, i switched when startpage got bought, and it was terrible, but i stayed for the !bang and just used !g sometimes, but it kept improving while google got worse, IMO it’s better than google now (and i didn’t even get the AI stuff yet).
I wish we could really press the main point here: Google is willfully foisting their LLM on the public, and presenting it as a useful tool. It is not, which makes them guilty of neglicence and fraud.
Pichai needs to end up in jail and Google broken up into at least ten companies.
Maybe they actually hate the idea of LLMs and are trying to sour the public’s opinion on it to kill it.
