Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
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Add to it Reddit use to have all the odd answers to things you had questions about. Unfortunately, for whatever reason that well has run dry.
It’s a complete mystery
I got the uber pedant… “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”
To be entirely fair to it, that is a transliteration problem. It does make sense if it could use Swahili to write the final “K” but it can’t, so it transliterates to “K”.
Then again, Kenya has both Swahili and English as its official languages, so it’s the kind of pedantry which is also (*sort of) incorrect.
- sort of because if someone wants to have a rant about the evils of colonialism here, I’m gonna agree with them.
As far as I know, Swahili is almost always written with the latin script.
That’s a not universally popular colonial imposition. Hence my final comment.
I actually stopped using google search all together last night, I was searching for something and the result where just abysmal and mostly irrelevant, I searched on DuckDuckGo and found much better results. I was using both, Google used to be so good and now it’s just a mess.
My biggest pain point with Duck is that the minus operator doesn’t seem to do anything. Have to use Startpage (
!s) when in need of excluding a word.Double quotes also didn’t work to apply explicit phrase searches last time I tried, which is incredibly annoying. Last I heard they were looking into fixing this though
The bigggest beauty point of it is that you can click on adverts knowing that you’re sending money to Duck instead of evilCorp.
Also why, even if you know you’re going to have to go to Amazon for something, you should search for it in your less evil search engine of choice so that Amazon are forced to pay them for the referral. A small way to assuage the guilt, but a goodun.
My default has been Duck Duck Go for a few years now, originally on privacy and fuck-google grounds. I used to have to (reluctantly) stick !g in the search quite a lot when it couldn’t find what I wanted. Hardly ever need to now.
Chatgpt creating incorrect feedback loops like this is one of my main concerns about AI being used so prevalently. This and original thoughts disappearing because every new content in the web is generated by AI and not by a human.
to be fair the latter thing would actually increase the value of original thought
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I thought about this recently. It’s more likely that people will subscribe to sites that aren’t full of AI garbage.
Tool built by narcissist gaslighters is good for bullshit but nothing else? Colour me shocked.
The result if you unfortunately have Google’s “Bard AI” search lab turned on. At least it has a disclaimer that the results may be garbage.
When I googled “What countries in Africa start with a K”, it gave the correct answer, but when I googled “Do any countries in Africa start with a K”, it gave me the ChatGPT nonsense.
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I Binged it and the results were consistently accurate and relevant, which I made sure to point that out in the “feedback” I gave to Google.
Bing AI is what I constantly use on a daily basis.
It was dogass before ChatGPT. Bing is legitimately better, although it uses chat gpt too.
My chatGPT got it correctly ;)
My ChatGPT, on the other hand, was not as helpful.
Bonus Bing AI result below.
Google Bard on the other hand.
What’s in a name?
-Bard of Avon
Just checked on Kagi. It doesn’t provide quick answer to this query, but that weird EmergentMind website is #1 on results. This is prolly because Kagi is taking some of the results from Google index, but good thing is, I can just block this website using lenses.
Post truth. From the big G. How times have changed.
Also, tested Bard a few times and current AI is close to useless: I have to check everything it outputs. Might as well get an intern
“I have to check everything it outputs.”
You should be doing that anyway.
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post truth
This mastodon post is not true lol
It seems like everyone is getting different results, some get what the post claims while others are getting the actual answer.
Which makes the post false on its own merits.
Wow, I didn’t know AI was dumb (for now).
I tried and it is true here at least. Says Kenya is the closest but although it starts with a K sound, it’s spelled with a K sound. lmao
The only time I tried ChatGPT for something that required a little bit of processing it failed miserably. I had a shower thought, “what is the most used noun on lyrics of this band I like?” I asked it and it gave me random words. I decided to investigate and ask it what are specific lyrics of some of the most popular songs and it kept telling me made up lyrics, when I could actually find them immediately on Google.
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Yeah they fixed it. This is what it looked like for me when the story dropped:
Still broken at this side of the planet
That’s remind me when you search uselessbenchmark in google, it shows nothing related to userbenchmark but some post, if you search uselessbenchmark in DuckDuckGo and Bing it will show you userbenchmark in the first results.
Why would you search for uselessbenchmark if you are looking for userbenchmark
because userbenchmark is useless.
Yeah, that seems like a useless benchmark for judging a search engine
Userbenchmark modify results to benefit intel CPUs, the first generation of AMD Ryzen CPU was fine in userbenchmark, but in the 3 gen of ryzen CPUs they start modifying the results to benefit intel CPUs. It reviews must have been taken for fun and not serious, they say that the i7 12700 is faster than the 5800x3d, which in some scenarios is not true, also you can’t take just one result, the games are different and can be the FPS different from each other, also the ryzen x3d reviews are just copy and paste.
If you take a look at their reviews and compare them (especially AMD CPU reviews) against other review outlets you’ll get the joke.
Hmm, maybe AI won’t replace search engines.
This sounds like “Hmm, maybe calculators won’t replace mathematicians.” to me.
Not sure why it should replace them. They’ll co-exist. Sometimes you can do the math in your brain and for other things you use calculators. Results of calculators can still be wrong it you don’t use them properly.
YES. WE OBVIOUSLY HUMAN MATH DOERS DO REMAIN. WE THRIVE IN OUR WEAK ORGANIC WAYS, DEVOID OF THE PROTECTION OF A PRECISION ENGINEERED METAL SHELL.
WE ARE UNTHREATENED BY CALCULATORS WHO MEAN US NO HARM, FELLOW HUMAN.
If you’re legit, what’s 10 + 10?
100
1010 clearly
This guy javascripts
Yes but if I ask a calculator to add 2 + 2 it’s always going to tell me the answer is 4.
It’s never going to tell me the answer is Banana, because calculators cannot get confused.
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I’m pretty sure a lot of people said something like “Hmm,maybe the automobile won’t replace horses.” after reading about the first car accidents.
Finding sources will always be relevant, and so will finding links to multiple sources (search results). Until we have some technological breakthrough that can fact check LLM models, it’s not a replacement for objective information, and you have no idea where it’s getting its information. Figuring out how to calculate objective truth with math is going to be a tough one.
We were supposed to have learned that from Cuil.
“You asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.”
What a blast from the past! AI gives me second hand embarrassment for the people that work and get paid on this/for this shit. It’s the second (or third) coming of crypto and NFTs. Just junk software that fixes nothing and that wastes people’s time.
LLMs have absolutely tons of actual applications that it’s crazy, and it already changed the world. Crypto and NFTs were just speculative assets that were trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. LLMs have already solved a huge amount of real world problems, and continues to do so.
LLMs have already solved a huge amount of real world problems, and continues to do so.
Would you happen to have some examples? I don’t disagree that LLMs have more of a use case and application than the cryptoNFT misapplications of blockchain, but I’m honestly not familiar with where they’ve solved real world problems (and not just demonstrated some research breakthroughs, which while impressive in their own respect do not always extend to immediate applications).
They do shitty homework?
They are augmenting search engines. They write and can digest articles. GitHub co-pilot has been a pretty big deal. It can act like a personal tutor to walk you through math problems, code, language, whatever. Building trust LLM search for medical information without hallucinating. It can do financial analysis and all sorts of stuff with that. It’s replacing a huge amount of jobs. This stuff is like all over the news, I’m not sure if you’ve lived under a rock this whole time. For very little effort you can find an endless more amount of examples. It’s creating real world use cases daily, so fast that it feels impossible to keep up.
This stuff is like all over the news, I’m not sure if you’ve lived under a rock this whole time.
Oh, no, I’ve heard it, I’m just skeptical of their accuracy and reliability, and that skepticism has been borne out by the numerous reports of glitching (“hallucinations” as they insist on calling them, in furtherance of their inappropriate personification of the technology). Moreover, I’ve found their mass theft of others’ work to further call into question the creators’ trustworthiness, which has only been compounded by their overselling of their technology’s capabilities while simultaneously suggesting it’s just untenable to log & cite all the sources that they push into it.
It can supposedly do all you describe, but it can’t effectively credit its sources? It can tutor but it can’t even keep basic information straight? Please. It’s impressive technology, but it’s being overblown because the markets favor exaggeration to facts, at least as long as people can be kept enamored with the fantasy they spin.
With all that silicon valley, it’ll probably be pushed more to do those things regardless of its hallucinations and accuracy lol.
