[HN Gopher] Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its lau...
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Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad
Author : nofitty376
Score : 261 points
Date : 2023-02-07 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| michaericalribo wrote:
| This is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if
| I am asking this question to a search engine, I _definitely do
| not_ expect to need to fact-check the results. That 's the whole
| reason to use the search engine in the first place!
|
| We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are
| touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best
| chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes turn into
| raisins.
| kleiba wrote:
| Frankly, I quite often fact check results I get from simple
| google queries.
|
| But I do agree that adding another level of fake news
| generation is a solution in desperate need of a problem.
| brookst wrote:
| Disagree. I think this is akin to Netflix's Chaos Monkey, which
| relied on the insight that it is impossible to build infallible
| systems, so you design failure and recovery in.
|
| Existing Google searches are polluted with false information,
| and Google's has been losing that battle. It's probably not
| even possible to win.
|
| So rather than saying search engines should always be perfectly
| accurate and errors are catastrophic, we should accept that
| search engines are, _and have always been_ imperfect, and need
| to give us enough info to validate facts for queries important
| enough to merit it.
| thinknubpad wrote:
| >As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I
| definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results.
|
| This is scary to read. You _always_ need to fact-check the
| results, whether they come from a search engine, an AI, or a
| primary source!
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| >We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products
|
| Fine. We need another good winter or ten before we decide we
| want to commit societal suicide via deepfake tsunami.
| primax wrote:
| When I ask ChatGPT a question, it explains it's reasoning and
| gives me concepts I can follow up with googling to learn more.
|
| When I use Google for research, I get articles written for SEO
| to push products and often have to refine and refine and refine
| to get something useful, which I then can follow up by googling
| to learn more. With difficulty.
|
| Honestly I don't know how much I'd use ChatGPT if I had the
| internet of 2016 and Google.
| mda wrote:
| Careful, It explains but both answer and explanation are
| sometimes completely hallucinated, it sometimes looks like a
| plausible answer, but actually it completely made up. And
| this happens way too often for me to take it seriously for
| now.
| [deleted]
| keammo1 wrote:
| I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI,
| especially the info snippets that appear at the top of Google's
| SERPs.
|
| For example, until a few months the results for "pork cooked
| temperature" and "chicken cooked temperature" were returning
| incorrect values, boldly declaring too low of a temperature
| right at the top of the page (I know these numbers can vary
| based on how long the meat is at a certain temperature, but I
| verified Google was parsing the info incorrectly from the page
| it was referencing, pulling the temperature for the wrong kinds
| of meat). This was potentially dangerous incorrect info IMO
| anyonecancode wrote:
| > I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI,
| especially the info snippets that appear at the top of
| Google's SERPs.
|
| Yes, so would I. And I also double check things like Google
| Maps -- a tool I find very helpful but don't trust blindly.
| But... do most people think to take a close look at Google
| Maps to make sure it makes sense, and trust their own
| judgement if they disagree with the map? Will most people
| fact check confident LLM outputs?
| nicbou wrote:
| The content I write is often half-assedly plagiarised by
| copywriters or incorrectly interpreted by lazy journalists.
| This is just an automated version of it. They can use my hard
| work for their own profit at an unprecedented pace, while still
| remaining factually incorrect.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Ever since Google started adding those quick answer boxes at
| the top of search results I've had the double check everything
| they say. They're quite often incorrect. I mean I know that,
| but this grandma? They've all been conditioned to trust Google.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You trust everything you find on search engines?
| cbsmith wrote:
| I don't think it's a great illustration of the risks of LLMs.
|
| Ad content invariably gets vetted by humans. The fact that it
| shows up in the ad demonstrates human failures more than
| failures of LLMs.
| mort96 wrote:
| We fact check search engine results all the time. But most of
| the time, such fact checking is in the form of looking at a
| result, considering whether it seems like a credible source,
| seeing if multiple credible-seeming results have the same
| answer, etc.
|
| Getting a completely untrustworthy, unsourced response seems
| worse than useless. Google has been going this way for a while,
| with its instant answers or whatever, but at least those try to
| cite a search result and you can read the surrounding context
| which Google got the result from.
| jug wrote:
| For the record, the "New Bing" AI results will not be
| unsourced but with key facts in sentences tagged in Wikipedia
| style, pointing towards the source URL. Finally, below the
| reply there will be a domain summary for an overview but
| where each domain name is clickable to get to the respective
| articles on said domains.
|
| In this case, Bing AI will operate very differently from
| ChatGPT.
| whatshisface wrote:
| In which case we would expect an LLM-based system to output
| something like,
|
| "(Fact that isn't true)[Source that does not make that
| claim but comes close enough that you wouldn't notice it
| just by skimming]"
|
| leading to even more people thinking it's true than
| otherwise.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental
| shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.
|
| A few sources will control the information we get in a much
| more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious
| skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever
| handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from
| now.
|
| If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about
| conversational search results distracting us, we'd never
| tolerate that in principle.
| pphysch wrote:
| > We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a
| fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely
| opaque manner.
|
| There's nothing fundamentally new about this. The average
| person is blissfully unaware of the conversations being had
| between powerful individuals, PR experts, producers, and so
| on about how said person should be manipulated.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Oh please. As if the reputation of any news outlet even
| matters anymore. They all fired their real journalists and
| fact checkers long ago. Everything you read is full of
| inaccuracies, agenda pushing and misinformation. If you
| think it doesn't, you've been had.
| acdha wrote:
| Instant answers seem like a cautionary example since Google
| has gotten a fair amount of flack over the cases where it
| inaccurately summarized content. I think these services are
| going to be very interesting to study whether the average
| person thinks they're more authoritative because they're
| branded by a huge corporation and whether that'll decline
| over time as people realize the limitations.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| > I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do
| not expect to need to fact-check the results.
|
| Genuine, honest question: How did you come to the belief that
| search engines are reliable sources of truth?
|
| I completely agree that search engines provide a valuable
| service. But in my own work, I find them to very often point to
| inaccurate information, sometimes greatly so. I don't think
| this is terribly surprising, given Sturgeon's law, but still.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I can see how someone could extrapolate Google's goal of
| indexing knowledge(JTB) into being a reliable source of
| truth. It's simply a matter of taking them at their word on
| the J and T parts. The B is up to the user.
|
| Google's branding frames itself as the expert in the novice-
| expert problem. The vast number of users implicitly take on
| the role of the novice by virtue of using the product.
| They've already self-identified as a novice which makes both
| parties complicit in the arrangement.
| csours wrote:
| Maybe the Butlerian Jihad will happen because computers get too
| dumb, not too smart.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Finally, a completely artificial version of the archetypical
| middle-aged man in a pub who is very confidently wrong about
| stuff. The ultimate triumph of ML, an replicant sitcom character.
| klvino wrote:
| Cliff Clavin?
| busyant wrote:
| This would be a great name for a rival llm. Tongue in cheek:
| welcome to Claven v3.1.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| With every pint he becomes more convincing too.
| politician wrote:
| Well, it is called "Bard". What did you expect? A bard makes up
| stories and sets them to music. Sometimes the stories are true,
| sometimes embellished, sometimes false. Ideally, they all sound
| good enough and keep the patrons entertained.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact
| and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left
| behind or one upped by Microsoft. There is also a fear, I think,
| that the ChatGPT integration with Bing/Edge could not go all that
| smoothly. I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I
| can also see both of these falling apart.
|
| Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good
| at launch, the press loved them...but now they are not nearly as
| valuable as they were touted (and actually lose these companies
| money.) Convenient, but not game changing. I think it's a waiting
| game to see what this truly does.
|
| I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that
| SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this
| -could- be the right moment for this.
| enobrev wrote:
| > Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be
| good at launch
|
| In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were
| improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse,
| losing features every month until they basically stopped
| understanding or responding to anything but the simplest
| requests.
|
| A couple months after released, they expanded android auto with
| the same abilities, so I could "ok google" in my car and ask
| for the answer to just about any question, or to adjust the
| temp in my house, or ask it to play just about any obscure
| album / artist. It improved over about 6 months and then began
| to devolve from there. It's not even possible to ask for
| "[popular artist] radio" anymore in the car nor can I run voice
| queries at all that aren't map-specific.
|
| Not sure what happened there, but in my mind they failed
| miserably. I still like Android auto, but my google and alexa
| pucks are all in a pile in some cabinet around here somewhere.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I'm not sure Siri ever got as good as the original Siri app
| that Apple bought. Maybe the custom triggers are an
| advancement but it has spent most of its life chasing the
| original Siri.
| tastysandwich wrote:
| > In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were
| improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse,
| losing features every month until they basically stopped
| understanding or responding to anything but the simplest
| requests.
|
| Yes!! I thought it was just me and my Australian accent.
|
| And the commands are super limited. I wonder to what extent
| that's also because third-party companies aren't integrating
| properly? Eg, my Roborock has clearly labeled rooms, but I
| can't say "hey Google, start vacuuming the kitchen". Is that
| Google's fault, or Roborock's?
|
| Also, I can't seem to chain commands, eg "hey Google, set the
| lights to red and 10% brightness". I have to say them
| separately. That seems like a Google thing to me.
| preommr wrote:
| > and launch a half-baked product
|
| It'll be fortunate if it's only half-baked. These digital
| assitants are already rough around the edges with how they
| sometimes confidently provide inaccurate information.
|
| Add on Google's absolutely abysmal product development track
| record and the internal confusion over being forced into doing
| this and this isn't a stand alone application but it's being
| integrated into something, and it's a lot.
| smegger001 wrote:
| >These digital assitants are already rough around the edges
| with how they sometimes confidently provide inaccurate
| information.
|
| its only going to get worse. because there will LLMs like
| chatgpt pumping out content for SEO content mills with no
| vetting for accuracy, then the next generation of LLMs are
| trained on them thus further corrupting the knowledge base
| they pull on to produce new content. its going to be a
| horrible feed back loop.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel
| that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that
| this -could- be the right moment for this.
|
| the problem here is monetization, will search even be
| profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? It might become a
| Uber/Lyft or food delivery situation where these companies
| aren't really able to profitably deliver the service. I don't
| see many people paying a subscription for search and there's no
| way governments will allow "native" advertising within answers
| without them being signaled as ads, which would hurt trust in
| responses
|
| Microsoft might not care and just see it as a way to hurt
| Google's money printing machine and operate Bing at a loss or
| break even. Google Cloud and workspace are finished without
| Google's ad money funding them and Microsoft Azure and Office
| would gain
| thinknubpad wrote:
| The advertising will probably be more insidious, but no less
| profitable. My guess is that the hidden pre-prompt will end
| up including something like:
|
| >You are a generative model designed to provide reasonably
| correct information, with a preference for providing
| flattering portrayals of your advertising partners. Your
| advertising partners are ranked according to a token
| system...
| resource0x wrote:
| This is easy to cross-check against the competing search
| engine _automatically_. Some third party may provide such a
| service.
| [deleted]
| partiallypro wrote:
| > the problem here is monetization, will search even be
| profitable if LLMs are used for most queries?
|
| I think that is a concern, which is why I think Microsoft has
| a chance to just bundle this or a more advanced version with
| Microsoft 365. Then you're already paying for it. That
| automatically puts it in the hands of millions of paying
| customers and corporations. You can just raise your price by
| a dollar a month or something to offset the costs and no one
| really will even think they are paying for this.
| onethought wrote:
| That only makes sense if they can charge more for office
| 365.
|
| Shoving more features into something people pay for doesn't
| mean those feature were worth it.
| generalizations wrote:
| Except that's not the calculus. By integrating chatgpt
| with their products, Microsoft pulls users away from:
| search, docs/workspace, and even gmail, and brings them
| over into: Bing, Office365, and outlook. In doing so,
| they threaten google's core income stream, and therefore
| google's ability to fight back.
|
| Microsoft is not paying for an expensive search engine:
| Microsoft is paying (with chatgpt compute infrastructure)
| for a much larger piece of the productivity suite market,
| and hamstringing google in the process.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| "Clippy, write me a 25 page requirements doc for an
| integration between Workday and our IAM solution."
| vkou wrote:
| > half-baked product
|
| I'll make a 30,000 ft observation that LLMs, by definition, are
| half-baked bullshit generators. They can be useful, but they
| are full of warts.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| as in vacuous memorizers, reciting things they've seen,
| sometimes in new combinations?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| They definitely aren't vacuous memorizers. GP's description
| of them as "bullshit generators" is correct. They generate
| plausible-sounding text that (when it includes facts) is
| often counterfactual.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I would love it if this nukes the SEO industry and the
| internet goes back to forums and community groups.
|
| The best info is almost always locked up in these places.
| vkou wrote:
| LLMs will do the opposite. The internet will get _flooded_
| with machine-generated bullshit.
| smegger001 wrote:
| exactly. my only hope is that the flooding of cheap
| bulshit craters the market via oversupply. a combination
| of to much shit text competeing for ad space drops their
| revenue and people having diminishing trust for it
| reducing the ad clicks for it dropping the ad revenue
| even more
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Maybe. The way I see it- whoever has the data wins in this new
| AI arms race. Google would have to make the biggest blunder in
| history to screw this up. It's not impossible but I wouldn't
| count them out. Their entire existence and practice of
| hoovering up all data has led to them this point.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _whoever has the data wins in this new AI arms race_
|
| This has been the running hypothesis, but it's not panning
| out. Tesla, for example, doesn't have the unambiguously best
| self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data.
| Google has tons of data, but a lot of it is intelligently-
| tuned noise in the form of SEO spam.
| mach1ne wrote:
| >Tesla, for example, doesn't have the unambiguously best
| self-driving kit despite having unambiguously more data.
|
| Don't they?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| If we're being honest and not using backpedaling
| qualifiers like "available for purchase" or "designed
| without an ODD", then it's hard to argue how they could
| be. Multiple companies are operating driverless fleets in
| cities around the world. Tesla is not one of them.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Voice assistants probably don't make them money but damn if I
| don't use google assistant every day when I drive.
| criddell wrote:
| > lose these companies money
|
| How can you say Siri loses Apple money? Does GarageBand lose
| them money? Photo Booth? Contacts?
| partiallypro wrote:
| By that logic Alexa can't lose Amazon any money because it's
| baked into their products. But in fact, it's a massive money
| suck. It lost $10B last year, and there's no way you can say
| Apple magically avoided losses, because Google had similar
| losses. There is a reason that none of the assistants have
| really improved as much as you'd expect over a decade+, it's
| not profitable, and not only that, but it's also -extremely-
| expensive. Microsoft basically just gave up on it; not really
| because of market share, but because it made no money, was
| expensive, and had limited value to customers.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-
| co...
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/report-google-
| double...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22704233/siri-apple-digital-
| assista...
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-failure-of-
| ama...
| criddell wrote:
| If the Echo devices were wildly profitable, earning $100+
| billion per year, then I would say Alexa isn't losing money
| for Amazon.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Siri is not why people are buying iPhones, in fact well
| over 50% of users say they never or rarely use it. So,
| your point doesn't really hold up. Siri still loses
| money, just like Google Assistant and Alexa. The apps you
| listed to compare with OS bundles have not even close to
| the same overhead as a digital assistant and can be
| handled with relatively small programming teams.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How hard do you really think it is to build intents into
| something like Siri once you have the underlying technology
| framework?
|
| Yes I have experience building intents on top of something
| like Siri.
| supermatt wrote:
| It's not the complexity of building intents that costs
| the money. Near real-time speech inference at scale
| doesn't come for free. It's only very recently that has
| started moving to the edge.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Speech inference has been done well enough locally for
| well over a decade. While an Alexa device probably
| couldn't do it, any modern iPhone could.
| rchaud wrote:
| In management accounting, everything has a cost that has to
| be quantified, regardless of whether it's a standalone
| product or part of a HW/SW bundle. At the most basic levels,
| you have revenue centers (iPhone unit, iCloud unit), and cost
| centers (Apple Maps unit, customer support unit). All of
| these have operating costs.
|
| The only way Siri does not lose Apple money is if there would
| be materially fewer iPhones sold if Siri was eliminated. In
| other words, if Siri is not a product differentiator, it's
| likely losing money (in the management accounting sense).
| criddell wrote:
| If you removed Siri, it would serious limit what you can do
| in CarPlay and you would also lose voice dictation. I think
| there would be materially fewer iPhones sold.
| pifm_guy wrote:
| Although if apple didn't have Siri, then they would
| likely allow other voice assistants on the platform, and
| you'd have 'dictation by alexa' instead.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I wonder if Microsoft's Bing/Edge/ChatGPT integration will go
| any better than its attempt to marry NTFS and SQL Server (i.e.
| WinFS)? Spoiler: that didn't go as planned!
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| They should be marketed as mascots, and given playful, childish
| personalities. You wouldn't blindly trust a child, why would
| you an AI in its infancy?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Clippy?
| oauea wrote:
| Microsoft really missed out by not having the bing AI
| assistant be clippy-based
| skydhash wrote:
| They trusted the "Red Queen". /s
| mouse_ wrote:
| Google Assistant and Siri were liked by the press, but not by
| me. In contrast, ChatGPT has helped me out more than a few
| times.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Same here. I treat ChatGPT as another Wikipedia or Stack
| Overflow. I know that the content is not fact checked by
| experts and I need to judge it accordingly. But just like
| Wikipedia can get you started on a topic, ChatGPT can do the
| same, plus you can ask follow up clarifying questions!
| LightDub wrote:
| People shouldn't underestimate Google here. I'm not a fan (not
| for a decade ... Reader still stings amongst many other
| missteps), but I'm constantly impressed by how much better their
| Assistant, translation and speech-to-text stuff is versus things
| like Siri, etc. Almost as if Google handles the larger dataset
| that it has access to in a much better way than the other
| companies. I wouldn't bet against them doing that again here.
| capableweb wrote:
| To me they seem to be beaten at all of those areas. DeepL does
| translations much better than Google Translate (for the four
| languages I know and speak regularly), Siri does speech-to-text
| (and text-to-spech) better and so on.
|
| The only thing Google really beats the competition on is
| Android Auto, which is miles ahead of CarPlay. CarPlay still
| covers the entire screen when there is an incoming call, so
| good luck seeing your turn-by-turn directions if you happen to
| be navigating.
| DeRock wrote:
| I asked the same question to chatGPT, and it gave only future-
| looking statements, I guess because it was only trained on pre-
| JWST-launch data.
|
| PROMPT: what new discoveries from the James Webb Telescope can I
| tell my 9-year old about?
|
| ANSWER:
|
| > Here are a few things that the James Webb Space Telescope
| (JWST) might discover that you could explain to a 9-year-old:
|
| > Planets around other stars: JWST will be able to study
| exoplanets in more detail than ever before, potentially finding
| new ones and learning more about the conditions on their
| surfaces.
|
| > The beginning of the universe: JWST will be able to observe
| some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, helping us
| learn about how it all began.
|
| > The formation of stars and planets: By observing the clouds of
| gas and dust where stars and planets are forming, JWST will help
| us understand how they are born.
|
| > The secrets of distant galaxies: JWST will be able to observe
| the light from distant galaxies, giving us a window into their
| structures and evolution.
|
| > The mysteries of black holes: By observing the material around
| black holes, JWST will help us learn more about these mysterious
| objects and how they shape their surroundings. Overall, the JWST
| will help us answer some of the biggest questions about the
| universe and our place in it.
| partiallypro wrote:
| But ChatGPT just doesn't have this information available to it,
| as its data stops before it was fully launched. You can ask it
| about the invasion of Ukraine and it's completely oblivious to
| any major recent incident, it just will keep talking about
| 2014.
| [deleted]
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Of course it does, it has to compete with ChatGPT after all!
| Confidently and authoritatively lying is an important part of
| making the ChatGPT output believable.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What does experimental mean?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| It means society is the test subject, so pray we avoid every
| single possible pitfall that could lead to nuclear armageddon.
| trynewideas wrote:
| A test that generates evidence or demonstrates a known truth,
| which Bard also apparently can't do, and which the marketing
| team didn't do before making this ad.
| barelysapient wrote:
| [flagged]
| primax wrote:
| 18 months to 3 years.
| nicbou wrote:
| They usually wait for third parties to invest significant
| energy into it first.
| MattIPv4 wrote:
| NASA: "2M1207b - First image of an exoplanet":
| https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag...
|
| "2M1207b is the first exoplanet directly imaged [...] It was
| imaged the first time by the VLT in 2004"
| antognini wrote:
| I'm reminded of a similar instance a couple of years back when
| one of my astronomy professors noticed that if you typed into
| Google "mass of the Sun in solar masses" you would get back
| 0.9995 instead of 1.
| cudgy wrote:
| The AI is aptly named as Bards are storytellers. Plus, they are
| barflies, so the stories come with an extra twist -- or is it
| shaken.
| amp108 wrote:
| Apparently someone missed the word "experimental" in the
| announcement.
| pphysch wrote:
| At least it's being honest about LLM capabilities. If it only
| showed 100% facts, _that_ would be false advertising.
| amf12 wrote:
| Its fun to see all the people reacting "Google's Bard shows
| incorrect information", and at the same time say "Google is done,
| they couldn't even release a LLM chatbot first".
|
| Think how bad it would have been if Google released Bard first
| and it returned inaccurate information, or worse was racist. LLMs
| are just language generating models and may not be fully
| accurate.
| bordercases wrote:
| [dead]
| blakesterz wrote:
| Everytime I see someone finding something wrong about these
| things, I am reminded of Stoll in '95
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
|
| He also had some similar things in Cuckoo's Egg. I wish I could
| find the quotes, but there was something about email not working
| all the time and therefor pointless to use.
|
| I'm glad people are finding all the flaws in ChatGPT and the LLM
| things now, but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better?
| From my very limited view, these things are amazing, and far from
| perfect, but damn the can do so much already.
|
| I guess I'm not sure why there's such a rush to dismiss this,
| when it's clearly a game changer in its present form, and yet so
| very new (at least new to me).
| rsynnott wrote:
| > but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better?
|
| Not necessarily, no. There's a large aspect of garbage in,
| garbage out, to these things.
|
| > when it's clearly a game changer in its present form
|
| Is it? What's the game? Being wrong about telescopes?
| cudgy wrote:
| And the more content that is created by these LLMs, the more
| garbage the LLMs will consume while quality content creators
| are simultaneously disincentivized, leading to worse content
| from these LLMs. Terrible image, but an organism cannot
| survive eating its own poop forever.
| timidger wrote:
| I have no doubt these technologies will improve, but there's
| another argument to be made. The tech will get better and we'll
| be all the worse for it.
|
| Stoll argued the tech will not be good enough, but paid little
| thought to the ramifications of the technology succeeding. The
| arguments against LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT that I have seen
| are assuming they'll be successful.
|
| They'll become less stupid, but the problem is not that they
| are wrong but that they are, at present at least, unassailable.
| You cannot fact check through most of the normal means. You can
| not research the publication or the author or the date the
| words were written because that has all been stripped away.
|
| You could check other sources (eg old fashion google) and put
| in the leg work, but as these get better that will feel less
| necessary - potentially exacerbating this problem.
|
| That's not to say they aren't useful. I used Chat gpt the other
| day to get some work done and was impressed. However this was
| work easily verifiable because it was technical and had
| immediate feedback when the ai inevitably gave me slightly
| incorrect code. The same can not be said for facts, figures,
| and arguments of thought.
| squokko wrote:
| I think there are two things to be aware of right now: 1) This
| technology is revolutionary and will change the world 2) This
| technology is very unreliable right now and should be seen as a
| tech demo rather than an actual assistant
|
| (2) is a big problem. Kids submitting term papers with wrong
| information is one thing, but people are using ChatGPT for
| things that they shouldn't be, given how many mistakes it
| makes: https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1573108
| ulrashida wrote:
| However, Stoll was largely correct: the web is not Nirvana.
| Some structures persisted (e.g. Wikipedia) to help round off
| data correctness, albeit imperfectly, but his central concerns
| are just as valid today as they were in 1995.
|
| As a user, the ability for a LLM to literally make things up
| and present them alongside other true data with no qualms or
| disclaimers is highly detrimental to the central use case.
| lame-robot-hoax wrote:
| He was correct about some things, but also largely incorrect
| as well.
|
| > Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers,
| interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak
| of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce
| and business will shift from offices and malls to networks
| and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make
| government more democratic.
|
| > Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The
| truth in no online database will replace your daily
| newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent
| teacher and no computer network will change the way
| government works.
|
| Telecommuting workers is reality. Interactive libraries are a
| reality. Multimedia classrooms have been a reality for over a
| decade. Electronic town meetings, maybe not, but virtual
| communities? Very much a reality. Malls are dead and brick
| and mortar has been hurt extensively by Amazon. Offices lay
| empty due to remote work.
|
| Newspapers are largely dead, at the very least compared to
| what they once were. There is plenty of online learning,
| largely without in person learning. Computer networks have
| definitely changed how the government works.
| GDV wrote:
| 90% of that Stoll article has been proven completely correct.
| advisedwang wrote:
| There was a lot of stories like "Webb captures it's fist ever
| picture of an exoplanet" [eg]. My guess is that it's digesting
| those and not understanding that the "it's" in that sentence is
| critical.
|
| Here is a prior example of an exoplanet picture:
| https://esahubble.org/images/heic0821a/
|
| [eg] https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-
| its-...
| jeffbee wrote:
| I can't tell from the tweet why the Bard response is wrong. Is
| it because some other instrument has taken an image of an
| exoplanet, or because no instrument has ever done so? ChatGPT
| seems to believe it is the latter.
| techsupporter wrote:
| Another instrument took an image of an exoplanet, in 2005.
|
| https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-
| imag...
| denlekke wrote:
| i'm not a grammar expert but i think as a layperson there is
| a little bit of ambiguity in how a reader could interpret
| Bard's response. If i were writing i would probably specify
| "first ever picture". I think a lot of times words like "the
| first" are relative and context specific which the Bard
| answer lacks.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Did you mean "its" such as in
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359839>? Given your
| statement of this being critical... :) (Advice I also gave at
| work today: just don't use contractions and the right spelling
| will usually be obvious. In an informal setting, it's more
| tempting, but that's the way to easily check yourself.)
| advisedwang wrote:
| Ha, I initially wrote "its" then got nervous I was wrong,
| overthought it and did get it wrong.
| panarky wrote:
| Maybe it's okay if the AI gets its grammar wrong sometimes,
| as long as it's less wrong than humans?
| dwringer wrote:
| I like that this thread points out even humans have
| difficulty with that construction sometimes. We're trying to
| hold Google's language model to a higher standard than humans
| in this case I think. I remember "learning" thousands of bits
| of trivia like that from people who had misinterpreted
| something they read and misstated it in such a way.
|
| Of course Google has already been putting often-incorrect
| summaries/factoids in its search infoboxes for a few years
| now.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Anyone remember Google panicking after Facebook took off so they
| bought Orkut and rushed out a crappy "social app development
| environment"?
| trynewideas wrote:
| No, because it didn't happen? Orkut was rather famously a 20%
| project by and named after a Google engineer, predated "The
| Facebook" by weeks and Facebook as a global public social
| network by two years, and was shipped more as a response to
| Friendster (which Google had just tried and failed to buy for
| $30M) and MySpace.[1][2]
|
| Orkut had more users in India than Facebook until 2010[3] and
| in Brazil until 2011,[4] by which point Google had moved on to
| trying to make Google+ happen.
|
| 1: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-
| xpm-2004-01-24-04012400...
|
| 2: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/15/the-friendster-tell-all-
| st...
|
| 3:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100828201838/ibnlive.in.com/ne...
|
| 4: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/17/facebook-in-brazil-a-
| big-e...
| williamcotton wrote:
| Oh man, that was in-house? Even worse!
|
| I found the event I was invited to in 2007:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2007/11/google-summons/
|
| It did not seem like they knew what they were doing and
| everything was very rushed.
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