[HN Gopher] Working with The Associated Press to provide fresh r...
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Working with The Associated Press to provide fresh results for the
Gemini app
Author : alexrustic
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-01-15 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| itsibitzi wrote:
| As someone who works in the news industry I find it pretty sad
| that we've just capitulated to big tech on this one. There are
| countless examples of AI summaries getting things
| catastrophically wrong, but I guess Google has long since decided
| that pushing AI was more important than accurate or relevant
| results, as can also be seen with their search results that
| simply omit parts of your query.
|
| I can only hope this data is being incorporated in some way that
| makes hallucinations less likely.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Gemini is the leading model with the lowest hallucination rate:
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-ai-models-with-the-l...
|
| I would expect that number to go down from 1.3% to below 1%
| over the course of the year.
|
| There's always a chance what you're reading is wrong - due to
| purposeful deception, negligence, or accident.
|
| Realistically, hardly anything is 100% accurate besides math.
| simonw wrote:
| The Gemini models themselves may score well on this, but
| Google's feature implementations are a whole other thing. AI
| Overviews frequently take untrustworthy search results (like
| a fan fiction plot outline for Encanto 2) and turn those into
| confidently incorrect answers.
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/encanto-2/
| kccqzy wrote:
| And doesn't bringing in The Associated Press solve this
| problem? No need for the AI to decide what is trustworthy
| or not. For the vast majority of people everything The
| Associated Press publishes is trustworthy.
| stusmall wrote:
| 1.3% isn't great. I'd rather just go, and pay, directly to
| trusted news sources. Everyone has different tolerance for
| falsehoods and priorities I guess.
| baq wrote:
| You'd have to pay quite a bit to get journalists to answer
| your questions specifically.
|
| The whole isn't about generating news articles, it's about
| getting the model up to date on facts so it can synthesize
| a newspaper for you. I'd say it's a way to get journalists
| to be journalists again instead of clickbait composers - as
| long as the model doesn't inject clickbait there itself. I
| don't trust Google to not do it sometime, but they aren't
| doing it now and the infrastructure is being made for
| others to consume when Gemini suffers from inevitable
| enshittification.
| stusmall wrote:
| > You'd have to pay quite a bit to get journalists to
| answer your questions specifically.
|
| This isn't what I meant. I pay directly for
| subscriptions/donations to news organizations that
| employee journalists that do this original reporting. I
| don't want a middle man that just messes it up. This goes
| for LLMs and for free news sites that don't do much more
| than summarize original reporting. I've seen more than a
| few times where they inject opinions, mess up facts or
| put focus on what was originally a small side point in
| the article.
| jonas21 wrote:
| What's the error rate for human journalists? Based on my
| experience, I'd guess it's much higher than 1.3%.
| marsavar wrote:
| Except when that happens, a clarification is almost
| always added at the bottom of the article ("This article
| was amended on [date]. An earlier version said xxx" or
| some variation thereof). You're not gonna get a second
| push notification from an AI summary saying "Oopsies, the
| previous notification was wrong". Once it's out, it's
| out, and that sort of damage is difficult to repair.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Yes, but that's going to be on top of the ~1.3%
| hallucination rate (largely, there's always some very
| small chance it hallucinates the truth when the article
| had it wrong - but basically not worth considering).
| stusmall wrote:
| As others have already pointed out, feeding these new
| articles aren't magically going to make them any more
| accurate. These hallucinations are going to be on top of
| any errors in the data sources.
|
| I'm not replying to point that out, I think others have
| done a better job. It's mostly that this conversation
| made me think of this classic Babbage quote that I've
| always enjoyed.
|
| "On two occasions I have been asked, - 'Pray, Mr.
| Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
| the right answers come out?' ... I am not able rightly to
| apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
| provoke such a question"
| marsavar wrote:
| Anything other than 0% is borderline immoral. Imagine
| sending a push notification to somebody's phone with a
| completely made-up headline summary. Even if it happens
| once in a hundred times, that's too much. Things like that
| slowly but surely erode trust and make it harder and harder
| to trust anything that's generated by AI, especially when
| it comes to news, where trustworthiness is essential, and
| probably the main reason people pay for news. See for
| example https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge93de21n0o
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Have you ever read a news article on a subject where you
| have expertise and knew it was inaccurate? The news is
| probably more inaccurate than you think.
|
| I bet you think the news is accurate all other times.
| It's called "Gell-Mann Amnesia"
| anomaly_ wrote:
| This is a ridiculous standard. News headlines at the
| moment would have an error rate wildly above 1.3%. The
| articles about Apple having trouble with LLM headlines is
| that the on-device model is weak and it's trying to
| compress too much into too few characters. I'd guess the
| chance of Gemini incorrectly summarising an article to be
| almost 0%.
| peanutz454 wrote:
| > There's always a chance what you're reading is wrong - due
| to purposeful deception, negligence, or accident.
|
| I am quite certain my personal hallucinations level is more
| than 1.3%, obviously we want our machines to be better than
| us, but my doctor once said folic acid is not a vitamin.
| itsibitzi wrote:
| I think people really don't understand the effort, care and
| risk that goes into producing quality reporting.
|
| I work with investigative reporters on stories that take many
| months to produce. Every time we receive a leak there is an
| extensive process of proving public interest before we can
| even start looking at the material. Once we can see it in we
| have to be extremely careful with everything we note down to
| make sure that our work isn't seen as prejudiced if legal
| discovery happens. We're constantly going back and forth with
| our editorial legal team to make sure what we're saying is
| fair and accurate. And in the end, the people we're reporting
| are given a chance to refute any of the facts we're about to
| present. Any mistakes can result in legal action that can
| ruin the lives of reporters and shut down companies.
|
| Now, imagine I were to go to a reporter who has spent 6
| months working on a story about, for example, a high profile
| celebrity sexually assaulted multiple women, how the royal
| family hides their wealth and are exempt from laws, or how
| multinational corporations use legal loopholes to avoid
| paying taxes, and said, "oh, 1% of people reading this will
| likely be given some totally made up details".
|
| Given that stories often have more than a million
| impressions, this would lead tens of thousands of people with
| potentially libellous "hallucinations".
|
| It simply should not be allowed.
|
| LLMs have their place, for sure, but presenting the news is
| not it.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Although I agree with every single sentence you've said,
| we've seen in the past decade how only very small
| percentage of people actually care about the content of the
| news. Everyone just discusses and gets their information
| from the headlines, so this is a natural consequence of
| "let's just summarize it to a couple of sentences since
| nobody reads it anyways".
| sandspar wrote:
| Journalism is dying, killed by its own excesses and by the
| internet. Google is offering it life support. The other option
| is death.
| Mainsail wrote:
| Theoretical question. What is replacing it? Is it this? Is it
| something else? Nothing? Curious to peoples thoughts on this.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'd wager 95% of what we call journalism today could simply
| disappear with no replacement and the world would be better
| off.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Potentially social media to a certain degree, at least for
| raw "news" of what is happening.
|
| Of course that willm be shit, but there we are.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| And what are we going to feed into the models without the
| journalism?
| baq wrote:
| Exactly the right question. Journalism has been given a
| lifeline, a way out of the attention economy.
| asdff wrote:
| Abrogate the direct primary inputs. Weather sensors.
| Wildfire cameras. Police scanners. Court proceedings.
| Changes to ordinances. New LLC filings. Bankrupcies. Birth
| records. Death records. The whole corpus of society that is
| automatically logged and used as the primary data for
| people to then perform research or develop journalism upon.
|
| That is what you siphon up. And in output you can mad lib
| out an article just like those johnny on the spot AP
| reporters do anyhow, filling in the skeleton article about
| a death or an attack or a banquet or award show with the
| relevant input concerning the event. LLM isn't even used
| for finding this input but to just adjust the boilerplate,
| perhaps to tailor news specifically to the reader's own
| inclinations based on engagement with other articles
| collected via fingerprinting.
| great_tankard wrote:
| You might want to look into why "journalism is dying" and
| whether Google (and Facebook) had anything to do with it.
| spankalee wrote:
| "killed by its own excesses"?
| dismalaf wrote:
| > I can only hope this data is being incorporated in some way
| that makes hallucinations less likely.
|
| The key word is "real-time". LLMs can't be trained in realtime,
| so it's obviously going to call an API that pulls up and reads
| from AP news, just like their search engine.
| notatoad wrote:
| i don't think you can assume that - "real time" in this
| context could just mean they feed every article into their
| training system as soon as it's published.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| They can't deploy that fast and people want to pin model
| version so it's not feasible anyhow.
| iamjackg wrote:
| That seems more unlikely to me -- training is not free and
| takes a long time, so it would not result in "[enhancing]
| the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app" and
| it being "particularly helpful to our users looking for up-
| to-date information."
|
| Fine-tuning, which is cheaper and faster, has been proven
| to not be a good solution to "teach" models new facts.
|
| I think what's most likely here is that Gemini will have
| access to a form of RAG based on a database of AP articles
| that gets updated in real-time as new articles are
| published.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Have you ever asked an LLM what time it is? It takes months
| to train them...
| tomrod wrote:
| But it can be trained to access basic, limited APIs to
| get current information.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Yes, which is literally what I suggested it does in my
| original comment.
| tomrod wrote:
| <3 thanks for calling out what I missed. I didn't realize
| you were supporting an earlier comment on the chain.
| summerlight wrote:
| If there's any company who can afford "real-time LLM
| training" at this moment, I'm 100% sure they will win this
| AI race since they probably have at least ~10x compute
| compared to competitors. Of course, no one can do that
| right now.
| extr wrote:
| Hallucinations are not a big problem with SOTA models at this
| point, especially grounded against an actual news article.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The examples that have made news were with iOS. iOS doesn't
| really do a summary of the content. It just tries to do a
| summary of the headline.
|
| The on device model that it uses is also literally 1% the size
| of the large models like Gemini
| nerdjon wrote:
| Unfortunately this has just been the reality over the last
| couple years. People just ignore the hallucination problem (or
| try to say it isn't a big deal). And yet we have seen time and
| time again examples of these models being given something, told
| to summarize it, and still hallucinate important details. So
| you can't even make the argument that its data is flawed or
| something.
|
| These models will interject information from their training
| whether or it is relevant or not. This is just due to the
| nature of how these models work.
|
| Anyone trying to argue that it doesn't happen that often or
| anything is missing the key problem. Sure it may be right most
| of the time, but all that does is build a false sense of
| security and eventually you stop double checking or clicking
| through to a source. Whether it is a search result,
| manipulating data, or whatever.
|
| This is made infinitely worse when these summaries are one and
| done, a single user is going to see the output and no one else
| will see it to fact check. It isn't like an article being wrong
| that everyone reading it is reading the same article, can then
| comment that something is wrong, it get updated, and so on and
| so forth. That feedback loop is non-existent with these models
| umvi wrote:
| > Anyone trying to argue that it doesn't happen that often or
| anything is missing the key problem. Sure it may be right
| most of the time, but all that does is build a false sense of
| security and eventually you stop double checking or clicking
| through to a source. Whether it is a search result,
| manipulating data, or whatever.
|
| Same problem existed before AI summaries.
|
| "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
| You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know
| well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You
| read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no
| understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
| article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--
| reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets
| cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
|
| In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the
| multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to
| national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of
| the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than
| the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what
| you know."
|
| - Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
| paxys wrote:
| The news industry capitulated to big tech the moment it got
| reliant on big tech for the majority of its revenue. The entire
| media landscape today is the direct result of that.
| asdff wrote:
| Take it a step back further, and you will see that the media
| landscape capitulated to Big Anything a long time ago. For
| probably generations now, if we consider people like william
| randolf hearst and other newspaper men.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's responsibility laundering -- AI can say whatever they want
| and they can shrug it off by saying bots are sometimes
| unreliable
| asdff wrote:
| Uhh, has your head been in the sand? Look at the average output
| of your industry without ai. It gets things wrong. It misleads.
| It hallucinates. It has incentives that fundamentally differ
| from what the readership seeks in news. The fact that your
| industry took so readily to the technology to output ever more
| garbage says it all about the state of the industry vs any
| condemnation of the fundamental technology.
| heavyarms wrote:
| There's not a lot of detail in the announcement but I assume this
| is some kind of RAG system. I wonder if it will cover some short
| time period (past week, past month?) or if they are trying to
| cover the whole time period since the knowledge cutoff of the
| current model.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| My guess is that they'll just stuff a few daily headlines into
| the prompt so that queries about current affairs have some
| context, rather than re-training the model. Total guess
| obviously.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| RAG isn't re-training. You can have vector embeddings of all
| AP news in a vector DB, then when prompted, find related news
| via similarity search, and add the most similar (and thus
| related) ones to the context.
|
| Here's some simple example code in Go, for RAG with 5000
| arXiv paper abstracts:
| https://github.com/philippgille/chromem-
| go/tree/v0.7.0/examp... (full disclosure it's using a simple
| vector DB I wrote)
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| We've gone the whole way from decentralization and rebelliousness
| of the early internet and the landscape is becoming suffocatingly
| sterile (=lifeless).
|
| I'm much more excited about eventual emergence of underground
| homebrew models without any guardrails...
| umvi wrote:
| > I'm much more excited about eventual emergence of underground
| homebrew models without any guardrails
|
| Not if AI gatekeepers and interest groups have anything to say
| about it. AI without guardrails could be classified as a
| "weapon" and made illegal such that we are only allowed to use
| models produced by regulated entities and meet certain "safety
| standards" (like how medical software has to be approved by
| FDA).
|
| Edit: oh, I guess "underground" could be interpreted in a way
| that these models are still produced and distributed (but
| secretly, illegally, etc)
| eichi wrote:
| One of the CEO was really competitive and has been the few legecy
| asset which are contributing current Google: other legecy assets
| are pools of competitive people who hadn't found the best place
| to show the ability. Current google is just the target of the
| good profile.
| throw7 wrote:
| I wonder what the byline will look like. I'm sure their current
| crop of beat reporters are enthusiastic with developments.
| bangaroo wrote:
| wow! this sure is great! gemini has worked so great up until this
| point - for example, i learned that a man who died in 1850 is one
| of three private owners of the airbus a340-600 last week! i'm so
| glad gemini exists and i absolutely cannot wait to experience a
| world wherein people get news from it.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Is there the option to get the news then as they fly in
| immediately in a feed?
| Mr-Frog wrote:
| https://developer.ap.org/ap-media-api/agent/Feeds_and_Linked...
| nxobject wrote:
| I'm surprised I'd never asked that question before, since the
| AP and other syndicates began as teletype wire feeds. What do
| modern newsrooms use as the modern replacement of the AP
| "wire"?
| xnx wrote:
| The timing of this announcement is surely to contrast to open
| OpenAI which is currently in court being sued by The New York
| Times.
| smithcoin wrote:
| FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you'll need to go
| here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/47208553126 and
| here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/793154499678.
| sebmellen wrote:
| The hero we needed
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Google, what we really want are ads.
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