Post AaYGzIxBmlCXMGdcPI by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
(DIR) More posts by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
(DIR) Post #AaYGyzJ8pQsSQYkrqa by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:07:41Z
1 likes, 5 repeats
I wanted to consolidate a few thoughts on google, misinformation, large language models, enshittification, and the fate of the web as we know it.It started when Carl Zimmer shared this remarkable example of Google being fooled by machine-generated bullshit online.
(DIR) Post #AaYGz1uR9jtmUoDgG0 by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:08:24Z
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One issue is Google's degree of culpability. Google is a search engine, not an encyclopedia. Ask a stupid question? Get a stupid answer. And seriously who is going to ask are there countries in Africa that start with K?My view is that Google's culpability was radically transformed when it went from simply returning web pages as search results to presenting results from web pages as definitive answers, via its "featured snippets", "knowledge panels", and "people also ask" feature.
(DIR) Post #AaYGz3qxvcJIWcbw7k by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:09:14Z
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Designing algorithms to return definitive results and then getting duped by conspiracy theorists is embarrassing; doing the same and getting pwned by the hapless stupidity of large language models is malpractice.IMO this is not simply a matter of Google's algorithms being no good. What's going on here is that Google is playing a losing game by trying to extract true information from the web algorithmically. Why would Google choose to play a game it could only lose?
(DIR) Post #AaYGz6D1Ab8dpawZm4 by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:10:16Z
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This is where enshittification comes in. The search engine business is a curious internet business. The better you are at it, the less time people spend on your website—and the less ad revenue, among other things, you receive. Google knows thisl. If they can give you the definitive result that you are looking for without you leaving the page, they win.It also, IMO, explains part of the motivation for Google in deploying an utterly second-rate large language model—Bard—in production code.
(DIR) Post #AaYGz90ikm5IWKDIWW by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:10:46Z
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(A bigger motivation is the same thing that keeps Google on top of the search game. They get all of the queries and thus have all the training data. Bing can't ever catch up. If Microsoft's GPT4+Bing went unanswered, Microsoft would get all of the training data for improving LLM-based search.)
(DIR) Post #AaYGzB3z7bsqt1kvtA by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:11:07Z
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So just as Google has strong incentives to keep users onsite using shitty large language models that hallucinate, it has strong incentives to keep users onsite by making even relatively unreliable guesses about what constitutes a definitive answer to a search query.
(DIR) Post #AaYGzD2zkGHR2XJAci by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:11:54Z
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And in doing so, Google becomes a *bullshitter* in the exact sense we wrote about in our book Calling Bullshit. They have designed a system that generates "language, statistical figures, and data graphics intended to persuade by impressing...a reader or listener with a blatant disregard for truth."
(DIR) Post #AaYGzF5u8PnPO8gWR6 by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:13:17Z
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If google wasn't big enough to move the market, this would just be a story about google's downfall and vulnerability to competition. But if google succeeds in keeping people on-site instead of visiting links, the incentives for people to create high-quality content fall through the floor. Whether you are a commercial provider funded by ads or an academic trying to disseminate something more than soundbite "featured snippets", google's efforts undercut your motives to create quality content.
(DIR) Post #AaYGzHC0KhrbtdYQDo by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:14:19Z
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Meanwhile the cost of creating content with the superficial appearance of well-considered text has fallen off a cliff, thanks to ChatGPT. So filling the web with quality material is less rewarding than ever, and filling it with shit is orders of magnitude cheaper than ever.Maybe someone unseats google before the web becomes a wasteland of ChatGPT-authored, search engine-optimized babble.
(DIR) Post #AaYGzIxBmlCXMGdcPI by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:15:36Z
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But the clock is ticking because google is so big and so powerful that its own internal enshittification process has massive spillover effects on the entire WWW.For the first time in a quarter-century I can imagine the death of the web as we know it, into a wasteland of GPT-6 content—the output of a model trained on mostly on the output of GPT-5—trawled only by chatbots pretending to be human readers to scrape up what ever remnants of long-term contract ad dollars are left to be had./fin
(DIR) Post #AaYKbCfnsrjgkLGkc4 by Oozenet@mastodon.social
2023-10-08T06:25:54Z
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@ct_bergstrom I can see an upside to this. The only people making good content are those doing it for love not money. These kind of people produce quality content.
(DIR) Post #AaYKbDLHOeueoyfsGG by ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org
2023-10-08T06:26:59Z
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@Oozenet Why produce quality content for love when people will never see it?
(DIR) Post #AaYKbE6mY2uVCItoIq by Oozenet@mastodon.social
2023-10-08T06:36:37Z
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@ct_bergstrom Google isn't the only way to find things. People aren't going to stop wanting good things. We might go back to things like webrings. There has been a bit of a renaissance in blogging since the big five got enshittified or became obviously fascist.
(DIR) Post #AaYKbErDlO3bWKctge by ocean@raru.re
2023-10-08T07:09:20Z
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@Oozenet @ct_bergstrom Everyone else in this thread is really pessimistic, but I find myself agreeing with youThis isn't that bad, if all the big corpo social sites go down or whatever people will be motivated to try something new or differentProfit motivation has ruined the quality of content on the big social sites, but that doesn't mean we can't have our own sites that don't have that profit motivation! We're on one now!
(DIR) Post #AaYKjSTn06La5LaNyC by Oozenet@mastodon.social
2023-10-08T07:10:49Z
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@ocean @ct_bergstrom Thank you. Indeed it is weird to be saying on a federated service that we are all doomed because of corporate enshittification.
(DIR) Post #AaYQjSBUhHwCtYPRXU by Oozenet@mastodon.social
2023-10-08T08:12:30Z
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@ct_bergstrom Remember DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ There is no reason something like it couldn't be done again. It's strength was that actual humans reviewed each addition to the directory.
(DIR) Post #AaYQjTIGZawuKqaMjY by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2023-10-08T08:18:03Z
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@Oozenet > Remember DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ There is no reason something like it couldn't be done againIt has. See:https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/109865528828152648@ct_bergstrom
(DIR) Post #AaYR13YF1NO1i2RVxo by Oozenet@mastodon.social
2023-10-08T08:21:11Z
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@strypey @ct_bergstrom Awesome. Curlie - https://curlie.org/docs/en/about.html
(DIR) Post #AaYe6vhCRJK4UHlQJc by justdude@mastodon.nl
2023-10-08T09:10:30Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@ct_bergstrom @stefano Latest ridiculous example: google selects the best photos for you using AI, nice that they can store all the meta data where you went, what you did and with whom. #ThinkBeforeYouClick