Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.
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TBH I hate the term “hallucination” in this context. It’s just more BS anthropomorphizing. More marketing for “AI” (also BS). Can’t we just call it like garbage or GIGO or something more accurate? This is nothing new. I know that scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing but just saying…
We don’t choose. It’s decided to be the term for this. Computer bugs aren’t bugs. Etc etc. It’s just what the scientists called it
scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing
Even though I agree in this context “hallucination” is actually the scientific term. It might be poorly chosen but in LLM circles if you use the term hallucination, the vast majority of people, will understand precisely what you mean, namely not an error in programming, or a bad dataset, but rather that the language model worked well, generating sentences that are syntactically correct, that are roughly thematically coherent, and yet are factually incorrect.
So I obviously don’t want to support marketing BS, in AI or elsewhere, but here sadly it matches the scientific naming.
PS: FWIW I believed I made a similar critic few months, or maybe even years, ago. IMHO what’s more important is arguably questioning the value of LLMs themselves, but then it might not be as evident for many people who are benefiting from the current buzz.
It’s not, actually. Hallucinations are things that effectively “come out of nowhere”, information that was not in the training material or the provided context. In this case Google Overview is presenting information that is indeed in the provided context. These aren’t hallucinations, the AI is doing what it’s being told to do. The problem is that Google isn’t doing a good job of providing it with the right information to summarize.
My suspicion is that since Google is using this AI for all search results it’s had to cut back the resources it’s providing to each individual call, which means it’s only being given a small amount of context to work from. Bing Chat does a much better job, but it’s drawing from many more search results and is given the opportunity to say a lot more about them.
Can’t we just call it like garbage or GIGO or something more accurate?
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Ah, so it only affects searching from the US for now. I already wondered why I couldn’t reproduce the stuff I saw here and why I didn’t really see a change at my Google results.
You probably live in one of those “socialist” countries that has, like, consumer protection laws and stuff.
It’s not hallucination, the proper word is Confabulation. Can we as a collective fix this now before we get stuck with the wrong word for the next 30 years?
Does anyone have a realistic idea of how this happened? I get Google has been fallen off for awhile but they’re still a multi billion dollar company.
Easy: worse results with more ads means more searches and thus more ad impressions, therefore profit.
That’ll only work for so long, but that seems to be what they’re doing.
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I mean, isn’t garbage in garbage out also true of humans?
Humans may test garbage knowledge in real life and experience failure. So in that sense no?
Worked for a company that had google as a client:
Google sucks, everyone who works there is an idiot who sniffs their ass all day, nothing works, nothing gets fixed, it’s all just held together with duct tape.
I can’t imagine a ton of the people working there give a shit anymore when it seems like thousands of people are being layed off weekly while the company takes in billions in profit
So like a quit quitting revolt.
Always remember that having more money doesn’t mean someone (or some entity) is more capable or intelligent. It just means they have way more latitude to fuck up, higher potential to hurt more people, and less chance of facing negative consequences when they do.
I’m probably late, but in this case this is the combinations of 2 things.
- The usual capitalistic incentives ruined yet another company. There was a recent article about how Google pushed out the people who builded and maintaned search on favor of MBA growth focused assholes. Like they put the guy that was Yahoo’s CEO while Yahoo search was crumbling, in charge of Google search to get him to increase the amount of searches they serve, and ads obviously. People keep suggesting to use DDG, or Kagi, or some other comercial product. And for now, we must because Google is basically useless right now. But just give time to the other companies to fall in the same trap hahaha.
- LLMs are not smart, not even close. They are just a parlor trick that has non technical people fooled. There is a lot of evidence to me, but to me the most obvious one is that they don’t have anything resembling human short term memory. Like the way they make them look like they are having a conversation is by providing the entire conversation up to that point, including their own previous responses lol, as input/context so the bot autocompletes the conversation. It literally can’t remember a single word of what you said on it’s own. But sureee, they are just like humans lol.
So what we have here is obvious, we have a company trying to grow like cancer by any means necessary. And now they have a technology that allows them to create enough smoke and mirrors to fool non technical people. Sadly, as part of this they are also destroying the last places of the internet not fully controlled by corporations. Let’s hope lemmy survives, but it’s just a matter of time before they flood this place too.
including their own previous responses lol, as input/context so the bot autocompletes the conversation. It literally can’t remember a single word of what you said on it’s own.
Chatgpt has had memory from previous conversations for about a month now and it’s context window is no longer fixed. Additionally it has the ability to assign sentences to memory on its own. So if it “thinks” what you said is important it saves it.
Can you point me to the paper/article/whatever where this is being discussed please? I’m actually interested on learning about it. Even if I don’t like the way they are using the technology, I’m still a programmer at hearth and would love to read about this.
To the point of the conversation, honestly man that was just an example of the many problems I see with this. But you have to understand that people like you keep asking us for proof that LLMs are not smart. But come on man, you are the ones claiming you solved the hard problem of mind, on the first try no less hahaha. You are the ones with the burden of proof here and you have provided nothing of the sort. Do better people or stop trying to confuse us with retoric.
I mean it’s just the release notes. Go to their website. I have used the memory feature myself on the app so know it’s working and as for the context window it can actually tell you what it is for each session.
But you have to understand that people like you keep asking us for proof that LLMs are not smart.
Where? Where have I asked that? Don’t strawman me, I am not your punching bag and won’t defend something I didn’t say. You can “come on man” all you want but it won’t change my answer. I have made zero claims if this thing is smart or asked anyone to weight in on the issue either way.
I pointed out two features it has now, which I don’t think anyone can dispute that it does have those features. It has a larger context window and memory that it can update. That is all I said, a very small claim that you can prove for yourself in under five minutes by going to their website.
Oh, you are talking about this https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8590148-memory-faq hahahaha. I’m sorry man, but you are a moron or arguing in bad faith. That’s yet another feature where they inject even more shit in the context/input to make it feel like the thing has memory. That’s literally yet another example of what I was pointing out, so thanks for confirming my suspicions. Seriously dude, do better if you really want to have a conversation. Your response made me waste my time, and on top of that you insult me hahaha.
Give me your traffic/money! (users/advertisers) 🤑 💰
-Google
It’s just a fucking Chinese Room
And humans aren’t?
Correct
Look my wife is gonna dispute that charge.
This is what I love about Mike Judge’s work. It turns out to be always the best metaphor/reference/prophecy of the boring dystopia. Since 1999.
Idiocracy is the most unrealistic sci-fi/apocolyptic film ever made. President Comacho finds the most qualified person to help with a crisis, asks them for advice and then doesnt take credit for it. Noone put in a position of power would ever do that.
He used Not Sure as a smokescreen since the beginning, the whole point is that he never really understood what was going on. I am quite sure that American presidents are approaching that level of idiocy.
Like we’ve seen before with AI chatbots, this technology seems to confuse satire with journalism
Unfortunately so does my aunt. And she’s allowed to vote.
I mean… yeah layoff a whole bunch of people and start treating your employees like replaceable commodities… then go ahead and arrogantly deploy technology you don’t understand and :surprisepikachu: everything breaks.
But management get to do things without personal consequence, as they’ll just lay off more workers to cover their absolute incompetence and things will continue to get worse.
Perhaps we should be replacing C-suite dipshits with AI’s instead.
brave got there first (wnd you can turn it off)
Why does search need to be AI? I’ve had no problems finding any information I wanted under the former process.
Because [buzzword here]!
It’s become more efficient to get basic info on virtually any topic by just asking an LLM like ChatGPT and that could be a serious threat to Google Search. People might form the habit of asking AIs for everything and then go to Google Search only when they want to dig deeper / find relevant articles etc. So I assume they added their own AI right into Search in an effort to continue being the first (and perhaps only) place one goes to for information.
But what about when you start wanting to know about life’s mysteries?
Google isn’t staffed by geologists; how are they to know what number of rocks you should eat each day?
Google search itself doesn’t have a functioning set of human organs; without AI how would they know how much urine to drink for kidney stones?
Without AI it might’ve taken another century before we got spicy gasoline pasta recipe, and you think that isn’t a problem?
it might’ve taken another century before we got spicy gasoline pasta recipe,
The Anarchists Cookbook has had the recipe for napalm for a bit now. But I do get your point.
And it works! I followed that recipe in the 80s, to hilariously non-fatal results.
I think the idea is that you won’t even leave the Google page at all, they want to keep you on their site and serve you their ads instead of sending you to someone else’s site and giving someone else that sweet sweet ad revenue.
The logic checks out. Avoid using google where possible.
YouTube is their only must have service imho
After the UI changes…yeah not even sure about that. Absolutely atrocious
Well they are still fucking us but can’t replace the content… Yet
But you can access the content without going to their site, with places like Invidious, and apps like NewPipe and Tubular.
I need it on my teevee so I pay.
I still use Foss client o my phone tho
If you have a way of installing android apps from the web on your TV, Smart Tube Next is very good. Sponsor Block is integrated if you want to use it, but I mostly am just glad it doesn’t serve ads.
Ah yes, tvs. I don’t watch enough yt to want to watch it on tv, so I often forget about that. You’re right, no easy answers there right now. Certainly there are ways, but all sacrifice some convenience. Hopefully this will change soon.
You obviously haven’t used the
web3 nocode blockchain NFTAI enough to have an informed opinion.Can I super-mega-ultra upvote this?
It’s the same playbook as ever. Doubt can only be explained by ignorance, failure can only be explained by under-committing,
The only way to have a “valid” opinion is to have already bought-in and be actively selling other people on it. It’s the same mentality as a cult or a pyramid scheme.
I think it’s been a long time since digital companies tried to solve actual problems.
an interesting change from it being a giant jumble of ads
What a weird combination where Bing has better AI but bad search while Google has bad AI but good search
Google *had good search. It’s been dogshit for some time now though.
Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination
And Bing search is not bad at all. CoPilot is firmly mediocre though
Bing search is still terrible. I frequently paste the same exact term from Bing to Google, and Bing won’t have a relevant return for pages, whereas Google still gets it in the first 3 links. I have Bing as my default on my work PC so I get to run this comparison frequently. I genuinely am curious how people think Bing returns better results than Google. It’s a night and day difference.
Copilot is no worse than chatGPT which is the current standard.
That’s because a good search engine is diametrically opposite of advertising.
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A good search engine shows you only what you want to see and shows it quickly.
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Advertising shows you want its sponsors want you to see, for as long as possible.
Good free-to-the-user search engines aren’t profitable. Advertising is massively profitable. Google can only try to thread that needle for so long before our “line must go up infinitely” corporate culture forces them to sacrifice the one for the other.
And that’s just talking about Google itself, not even mentioning the issue with SEO and how human nature causes websites to game the system to be more visible.
The craziest part is that when I use Google search to search for a service, that’s when I have the most trouble. Like many tech problems here on Lemmy (was similar on Reddit too), I find the outrage to be a bit overblown, but holy shit, if I want to find some kind of service where I want to exchange my money for something, Google fails me almost every time.
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“Hey, we just promised you answers. We never promised you correct answers.” – Google Marketing, probably.
“Besides, the more incorrect answers - the more time users will spend on our site and use our service to get the correct answer = more ads shown = more profit!”
