This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.

If only there was a way to show the whole world in one simple example how Enshitification works.

Google execs: Hold my beer!

I remember seeing a comment on here that said something along the lines of “for every dangerous or wrong response that goes public there’s probably 5, 10 or even 100 of those responses that only one person saw and may have treated as fact”

I was at first wondering what google had done to piss off Weird Al. He seems so chill.

"Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries,"

Ah the good old "the problem is with the user not with our code" argument. The sign of a truly successful software maker.

allowing reddit to train Google's AI was a mistake to begin with. i mean just look at reddit and the shitlord that is spez.

there are better sources and reddit is not one of them.

Id be tickled to have odd answers by mr. yankovic mself

It's evolving, just backwards.

Tech company creates best search engine —-> world domination —> becomes VC company in tech trench coat —-> destroy search engine to prop up bad investments in ~~artificial intelligence~~ advanced chatbots

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

Probably one of the shitstains in Google's C-suite after having signed a "wonderful" contract to get access to "all that great data from Reddit" forced the Techies to use it against their better judgement and advice.

It would certainly match the kind of thing I've seen more than once were some MBA makes a costly decision with technical implications without consulting the actual techies first, then the thing turns out to be a massive mistake and to save themselves they just double up and force the techies to use it anyway.

That said, that's normally about some kind of tooling or framework from a 3rd party supplier that just makes life miserable for those forced to use it or simply doesn't solve the problem and techies have to quietly use what they wanted to use all along and then make believe they're using the useless "sollution" that cost lots of $$$ in yearly licensing fees, and stuff like this that ends up directly and painfully torpedoing at the customer-facing end the strategical direction the company is betting on for the next decade, is pretty unusual.

Just let an algorithm decide. What could go wrong?

Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.

Correcting over a decade of Reddit shitposting in what, a few weeks? They're pretty ambitious.

You mean answers like this one?

Isn't the model fundamentally flawed if it can't appropriately present arbitrary results? It is operating at a scale where human workers cannot catch every concerning result before users see them.

The ethical thing to do would be to discontinue this failed experiment. The way it presents results is demonstrably unsafe. It will continue to present satire and shitposts as suggested actions.

Really admiring the hero graphic on this one. That is a home run hit.

Wouldn't it be easier to hardcode in the servers an entire encyclopedia instead of trying to limit a generative model to give only "right" answers?

The reason why Google is doing this is simply PR. It is not to improve its service.

The underlying tech is likely Gemini, a large language model (LLM). LLMs handle chunks of words, not what those words convey; so they have no way to tell accurate info apart from inaccurate info, jokes, "technical truths" etc. As a result their output is often garbage.

You might manually prevent the LLM from outputting a certain piece of garbage, perhaps a thousand. But in the big picture it won't matter, because it's outputting a million different pieces of garbage, it's like trying to empty the ocean with a small bucket.

I'm not making the above up, look at the article - it's basically what Gary Marcus is saying, under different words.

And I'm almost certain that the decision makers at Google know this. However they want to compete with other tendrils of the GAFAM cancer for a turf called "generative models" (that includes tech like LLMs). And if their search gets wrecked in the process, who cares? That turf is safe anyway, as long as you can keep it up with enough PR.

Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users.

There's a three letters word that accurately describes what Google said here: lie.