[HN Gopher] Death by AI
___________________________________________________________________
Death by AI
Author : ano-ther
Score : 515 points
Date : 2025-07-19 14:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (davebarry.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (davebarry.substack.com)
| rf15 wrote:
| So many reports like this, it's not a question of working out the
| kinks. Are we getting close to our very own Stop the Slop
| campaign?
| randcraw wrote:
| Yeah, after daily working with AI for a decade in a domain
| where it _does_ work predictably and reliably (image analysis),
| I continue to be amazed how many of us continue to trust LLM-
| based text output as being useful. If any human source got
| their facts wrong this often, we'd surely dismiss them as a
| counterproductive imbecile.
|
| Or elect them President.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| HAL 9000 in 2028!
| locallost wrote:
| I am beginning to wonder why I use it, but the idea of it is
| so tempting. Try to google it and get stuck because it's
| difficult to find, or ask and get an instant response. It's
| not hard to guess which one is more inviting, but it ends up
| being a huge time sink anyway.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Regulation with active enforcement is the only civil way.
|
| The whole point of regulation is for when the profit motive
| forces companies towards destructive ends for the majority of
| society. The companies are legally obligated to seek profit
| above all else, absent regulation.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Regulation with active enforcement is the only civil way.
|
| What regulation? What enforcement?
|
| These terms are useless without details. Are we going to fine
| LLM providers every time their output is wrong? That's the
| kind of proposition that sounds good as a passing angry
| comment but obviously has zero chance of becoming a real
| regulation.
|
| Any country who instituted a regulation like that would see
| all of the LLM advancements and research instantly leave and
| move to other countries. People who use LLMs would sign up
| for VPNs and carry on with their lives.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Regulations exist to override profit motive when
| corporations are unable to police themselves.
|
| Enforcement ensures accountability.
|
| Fines don't do much in a fiat money-printing environment.
|
| Enforcement is accountability, the kind that stakeholders
| pay attention to.
|
| Something appropriate would be where if AI was used in a
| safety-critical or life-sustaining environment and harm or
| loss was caused; those who chose to use it are guilty until
| they prove they are innocent I think would be sufficient,
| not just civil but also criminal; where that person and
| decision must be documented ahead of time.
|
| > Any country who instituted a regulation like that would
| see all of the LLM advances and research instantly leave
| and move to other countries.
|
| This is fallacy. Its a spectrum, research would still
| occur, it would be tempered by the law and accountability,
| instead of the wild-west where its much more profitable to
| destroy everything through chaos. Chaos is quite profitable
| until it spread systemically and ends everything.
|
| AI integration at a point where it can impact the operation
| of nuclear power plants through interference (perceptual or
| otherwise) is just asking for a short path to extinction.
|
| Its quite reasonable that the needs for national security
| trump private business making profit in a destructive way.
| Ukv wrote:
| > Something appropriate would be where if AI was used in
| a safety-critical or life-sustaining environment and harm
| or loss was caused; those who chose to use it are guilty
| until they prove they are innocent I think would be
| sufficient, not just civil but also criminal
|
| Would this guilty-until-proven-innocent rule apply also
| to non-ML code and manual decisions? If not, I feel it's
| kind of arbitrarily deterring certain approaches
| potentially _at the cost_ of safety ( "sure this CNN
| blows traditional methods out of the water in terms of
| accuracy, but the legal risk isn't worth it").
|
| In most cases I think it'd make more sense to have fines
| and incentives for above-average and below-average
| incident rates (and liability for negligence in the worse
| cases), then let methods win/fail on their own merit.
| trod1234 wrote:
| > Would this guilty-until-proven-innocent rule apply also
| to non-ML code and manual decisions?
|
| I would say yes because the person deciding must be the
| one making the entire decision but there are many
| examples where someone might be paid to just rubberstamp
| decisions already made. Letting the person who decided to
| implement the solution off scot-free.
|
| The mere presence of AI (anything based on underlying
| work of perceptrons) being used accompanied by a loss
| should prompt a thorough review which corporations
| currently are incapable of performing for themselves due
| to lack of consequences/accountability. Lack of
| disclosure, and the limits of current standing, is
| another issue that really requires this approach.
|
| The problem of fines is that they don't provide the
| needed incentives to large entities as a result of money-
| printing through debt-issuance, or indirectly through
| government contracts. Its also far easier to employ
| corruption to work around the fine later for these
| entities as market leaders. We've seen this a number of
| times in various markets/sectors like JPM and the 10+
| year silver price fixing scandal.
|
| Merit of subjective rates isn't something that can be
| enforced, because it is so easily manipulated. Gross
| negligence already exists and occurs frighteningly common
| but never makes it to court because proof often requires
| showing standing to get discovery which isn't generally
| granted absent a smoking gun or the whim of a judge.
|
| Bad things happen certainly where no one is at fault, but
| most business structure today is given far too much lee-
| way and have promoted the 3Ds. Its all about: deny,
| defend, depose.
| Ukv wrote:
| > > Would this guilty-until-proven-innocent rule apply
| also to non-ML code and manual decisions?
|
| > I would say yes [...]
|
| So if you're a doctor making manual decisions about how
| to treat a patient, and some harm/loss occurs, you'd be
| criminally guilty-until-proven-innocent? I feel it should
| require evidence of negligence (or malice), and be done
| under standard innocent-until-proven-guilty rules.
|
| > The mere presence of AI (anything based on underlying
| work of perceptrons) [...]
|
| Why single out based on underlying technology? If for
| instance we're choosing a tumor detector, I'd claim
| what's relevant is "Method A has been tested to achieve
| 95% AUROC, method B has been tested to achieve 90% AUROC"
| - there shouldn't be an extra burden in the way of
| choosing method A.
|
| And it may well be that the perceptron-based method is
| the one with lower AUROC - just that it should then be
| discouraged _because it 's worse_ than the other methods,
| not because a special case puts it at a unique legal
| disadvantage even when safer.
|
| > The problem of fines is that they don't provide the
| needed incentives to large entities as a result of money-
| printing through debt-issuance, or indirectly through
| government contracts.
|
| Large enough fines/rewards should provide large enough
| incentive (and there would still be liability for
| criminal negligence where there is sufficient evidence of
| criminal negligence). Those government contracts can also
| be conditioned on meeting certain safety standards.
|
| > Merit of subjective rates isn't something that can be
| enforced
|
| We can/do measure things like incident rates, and have
| government agencies that perform/require safety testing
| and can block products from market. Not always perfect,
| but seems better to me than the company just picking a
| scape-goat.
| Jensson wrote:
| > So if you're a doctor making manual decisions about how
| to treat a patient, and some harm/loss occurs, you'd be
| criminally guilty-until-proven-innocent?
|
| Yes, that proof is called a professional license, without
| that you are presumed guilty even if nothing goes wrong.
|
| If we have licenses for AI and then require proof that
| the AI isn't tampered with for requests then that should
| be enough, don't you think? But currently its the wild
| west.
| Ukv wrote:
| > Yes, that proof is called a professional license,
| without that you are presumed guilty even if nothing goes
| wrong.
|
| A professional license is evidence against the offense of
| _practicing without a license_ , and the burden of proof
| in such a case still rests on the prosecution to prove
| beyond reasonable doubt that you did practice without a
| license - you aren't presumed guilty.
|
| Separately, what trod1234 was suggesting was being
| guilty-until-proven-innocent when harm occurs (with no
| indication that it'd only apply to licensed professions).
| I believe that's unjust, and that the suggestion stemmed
| mostly from animosity towards AI (maybe similar to
| "nurses administering vaccines should be liable for every
| side-effect") without consideration of impact.
|
| > If we have licenses for AI and then require proof that
| the AI isn't tampered with for requests then that should
| be enough, don't you think?
|
| Mandatory safety testing for safety-critical applications
| makes sense (and already occurs). It shouldn't be some
| rule specific to AI - I want to know that it performs
| adequately regardless of whether it's AI or a traditional
| algorithm or slime molds.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| A very simple example would be a mandatory mechanism for
| correcting mistakes in prebaked LLM outputs, and an ability
| to opt out of things like Gemini AI Overview on pages about
| you. Regulation isn't all or nothing, viewing it like that
| is reductive.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > Are we getting close to our very own Stop the Slop campaign?
|
| I don't think so. We read about the handful of failures while
| there are billions of successful queries every day, in fact I
| think AI Overviews is sticky and here to stay.
| mepiethree wrote:
| Are we sure these billions of queries are "successful" for
| the actual user journey? Maybe this is particular to my
| circle, but as the only "tech guy" most of my friends and
| family know, I am regularly asked if I know how to turn off
| Google AI overviews because many people find them to be
| garbage
| gtsop wrote:
| Why on earth are you accepting his premise that there are
| billions of successful requests? I just asked chatgpt about
| query success rate and it replied (part):
|
| "...Semantic Errors / Hallucinations On factual queries--
| especially legal ones--models hallucininate roughly 58-88%
| of the time
|
| A journalism-focused study found LLM-based search tools
| (e.g., ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Grok) were incorrect in
| 60%+ of news-related queries
|
| Specialized legal AI tools (e.g., Lexis+, Westlaw) still
| showed error rates between 17% and 34%, despite being
| domain-tuned "
| draw_down wrote:
| Man, this guy is still doing it. Good for him! I used to read his
| books (compendia of his syndicated column) when I was a kid.
| hibert wrote:
| Leave it to a journalist to play chicken with one of the most
| powerful minds in the world on principle.
|
| Personally, if I got a resurrection from it, I would accept the
| nudge and do the political activism in Dorchester.
| jwr wrote:
| I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google
| thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and
| there is usually no way to correct it. Various "feedback" forms
| are mostly ignored.
|
| I had to fight a similar battle with Google Maps, which most
| people believe to be a source of truth, and it took years until
| incorrect information was changed. I'm not even sure if it was
| because of all the feedback I provided.
|
| I see Google as a firehose of information that they spit at me
| ("feed"), they are too big to be concerned about any
| inconsistencies, as these don't hurt their business model.
| muglug wrote:
| No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning
| Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the
| top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered
| your question.
|
| Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary
| LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that's cheap enough
| to run on webpage text for every search result.
|
| That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a
| search for "Suicide Squad" yields
|
| > The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of
| "Suicide Squad"
| weatherlite wrote:
| > That was a product decision, and a very bad one.
|
| I don't know that it's a bad decision, time will judge it.
| Also, we can expect the quality of the results to improve
| over time. I think Google saw a real threat to their search
| business and had to respond.
| gambiting wrote:
| The threat to their search business had nothing to do with
| AI but with the insane amount of SEO-ing they allowed to
| rake in cash. Their results have been garbage for years,
| even for tech stuff where they traditionally excelled -
| searching for "what does class X do in .NET" yields several
| results for paid programming courses rather than the actual
| answer, and that's not an AI problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have
| more sympathy for Google. They are just... losing at the
| cat-and-mouse game. They are playing cat against a whole
| world of mice, I don't think anyone other than pre-
| decline Google could win it.
| Arainach wrote:
| The number of mice has grown exponentially. It's not
| clear anyone could have kept up.
|
| Millions, probably tens of millions of people have jobs
| trying to manipulate search results - with billions of
| dollars of resources available to them. With no internal
| information, it's safe to say no more than thousands of
| Googlers (probably fewer) are working to combat them.
|
| If every one of them is a 10x engineer they're still
| outnumbered by more than 2 orders of magnitude.
| anonymars wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, but also supposedly at
| some point quality deliberately took a back seat to
| "growth"
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
|
| > The key event in the piece is a "Code Yellow" crisis
| declared in 2019 by Google's ads and finance teams, which
| had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response,
| Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes -- the erstwhile head of Google
| Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology -- to
| increase the number of queries people made by any means
| necessary.
|
| (Quoting from this follow-up post:
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/)
| h2zizzle wrote:
| No, they made the problem by not dealing with such
| websites swiftly and brutally. Instead, they encouraged
| it.
| zargon wrote:
| Google isn't even playing that game, they're playing the
| line-go-up game, which precludes them from dealing with
| SEO abuse in an effective way.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > SEO-wise (and in no other way), I think we should have
| more sympathy for Google. They are just... losing at the
| cat-and-mouse game.
|
| I don't think they are; they have realised (quite
| accurately, IMO) that users would still use them even if
| they boosted their customers' rankings in the results.
|
| They could, _right now_ , switch to a model that
| penalises pages for each ad. They don't. They could,
| _right now_ , penalise highly monetised "content" like
| courses and crap. They don't do that either.[1]
|
| If Kagi can get better results with a fraction of the
| resources, there is no argument to be made that Google is
| playing a losing game.
|
| --------------------------------------
|
| [1] All the SEO stuff is damn easy to pick out; any page
| that is heavily monetised (by ads, or similar commercial
| offering) is _very very_ easy to bin. A simple "don't
| show courses unless search query contains the word
| courses" type of rule is nowhere near computationally
| expensive. Recording the number of ads on a page when
| crawling is equally cheap.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They are doing an OK job of making AI look like annoying
| garbage. If that's the plan... actually, it might be
| brilliant.
| weatherlite wrote:
| I can't argue here, for me they are mostly useful but I
| get that one catastrophic failure or two can make someone
| completely distrust them. But the actual judges are gonna
| be the masses, we'll see. For now adoption seems quite
| strong.
| flomo wrote:
| Right, the classic google search results are still there. But
| even before the AI Overview, Google's 'en' plan has been to
| put as many internal links at the top of the page as
| possible. I just tried this and you have to scroll way down
| below the fold to find Barry's homepage or substack.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| No, the search queries are likely run through a similar
| "prompt modification" process as on many AI platforms, and
| the results themselves aren't ranked anything like they
| used to be. And, of course, Google killed the functionality
| of certain operators (+, "", etc.) years ago. Classic
| Google Search is very much dead.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Was there ever an announcement regarding the elimination
| of search operators? Or does Google still claim they are
| real?
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Nothing for "" afaik. + was killed to make Google+
| discoverable (or so Google claimed at the time).
| hughw wrote:
| Well it was accurate if you were asking about the Dave Barry in
| Dorchester.
| omnicognate wrote:
| He won a Pulitzer too? Small world.
| o11c wrote:
| I remember when the biggest gripe I had with Google was that
| when I searched for Java documentation (by class name), it
| defaulted to showing me the version for 1.4 instead of 6.
| sroussey wrote:
| Same problem with LLMs particularly if a new version released
| in the last year.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > It's a Google thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate
| information and there is usually no way to correct it.
|
| Surely there is a way to correct it: getting the issue on the
| front page of HN.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Google maps is so bad with its auto content. Ultra private
| country club? Lets mark the cartpaths as full bike paths.
| Cemetery? Also bike paths. Random spit of sidewalk and grass
| between an office building and its parking lot? Believe it or
| not also bike paths.
| sethherr wrote:
| Biking is great tho
| xp84 wrote:
| I mean, that last one sounds functionally useful, since it
| would indeed be better to take the random concrete paths
| inside an office property (that wasn't a closed campus) than
| to ride on the expressway that fronts it, if the "paths" are
| going where you're going.
| aimor wrote:
| I went to a party today at a park. Google maps wanted me to
| drive my car on the walking path to the picnic pavilion.
| Here, you can get the same directions: https://www.google.com
| /maps/dir/38.8615917,-77.1034763/Alcov...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This really made me laugh. Has Will Ferrell already made a
| skit for Funny or Die where he precisely follows Google
| Maps driving instructions and runs over a bunch of old
| people and children? It could be very funny.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Waze (also owned by Google) seems to get it close(r), but
| it should be noted that actually driving to/from those
| addresses can't really be done. You can drive to where you
| might be able to SEE the destination, but not really get
| there.
|
| https://www.waze.com/live-
| map/directions/us/va/arlington/alc...
| M4v3R wrote:
| For up to date bike paths, at least where I live I hear very
| good things about maps.me (based on OSM data).
| cosmical65 wrote:
| > I'd say this isn't just an AI overview thing. It's a Google
| thing. Google will sometimes show inaccurate information and
| there is usually no way to correct it.
|
| Well, in this case the inaccurate information is shown because
| the AI overview is combining information about two different
| people, rather than the sources being wrong. With traditional
| search, any webpages would be talking about one of the two
| people and contain only information about them. Thus, I'd say
| that this problem is specific to the AI overview.
| jamesrcole wrote:
| The science fiction author Greg Egan has been "battling" with
| Google for many years because, even though there are zero
| photos of him on the internet, Google insists that certain
| photos are of him. This was all well before Google started
| using AI. He's written about it here:
| https://gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Google doesn't really have an incentive to prioritize accuracy
| at the individual level, especially when the volume of content
| makes it easy for them to hide behind scale
| bokkies wrote:
| Back in 2015 I walked 2 miles to a bowling alley tagged on
| Google maps (in Northwich, England) with my then gf...imagine
| our surprise when we walked in to a steamy front room and
| reception desk, my gf asks 'is this the bowling alley' to which
| a glistening man in a tank top replies 'this is a gay and
| lesbian sauna love'. We beat a hasty retreat but I imagine they
| were having more fun than bowling in there
| _ache_ wrote:
| Can you please re-consult a physician? I just check on ChatGPT,
| I'm pretty confident you are dead.
| devinplatt wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of the special policies Wikipedia has
| developed through experience about sensitive topics, like
| biographies of living persons, deaths, etc.
| pyman wrote:
| I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent years
| trying to get things right, and now suddenly Google and
| Microsoft (including OpenAI) are using GenAI to generate
| content that, frankly, can't be trusted because it's often made
| up.
|
| That's deeply concerning, especially when these two companies
| control almost all the content we access through their search
| engines, browsers and LLMs.
|
| This needs to be regulated. These companies should be held
| accountable for spreading false information or rumours, as it
| can have unexpected consequences.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This needs to be regulated. They should be held accountable
| for spreading false information or rumours,
|
| Regulated how? Held accountable how? If we start fining LLM
| operators for pieces of incorrect information you might as
| well stop serving the LLM to that country.
|
| > since it can have unexpected consequences
|
| Generally you hold the person who takes action accountable.
| Claiming an LLM told you bad information isn't any more of a
| defense than claiming you saw the bad information on a Tweet
| or Reddit comment. The person taking action and causing the
| consequences has ownership of their actions.
|
| I recall the same hand-wringing over early search engines:
| There was a debate about search engines indexing bad
| information and calls for holding them accountable for
| indexing incorrect results. Same reasoning: There could be
| consequences. The outrage died out as people realize they
| were tools to be used with caution, not fact-checked and
| carefully curated encyclopedias.
|
| > I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent
| years trying to get things right,
|
| Would you also endorse the same regulations against
| Wikipedia? Wikipedia gets fined every time incorrect
| information is found on the website?
|
| EDIT: Parent comment was edited while I was replying to add
| the comment about outside of the US. I welcome some country
| to try regulating LLMs to hold them accountable for
| inaccurate results so we have some precedent for how bad of
| an idea that would be and how much the citizens would switch
| to using VPNs to access the LLM providers that are turned off
| for their country in response.
| pyman wrote:
| If Google accidentally generates an article claiming a
| politician in XYZ country is corrupt the day before an
| election, then quietly corrects it after the election,
| should we NOT hold them accountable?
|
| Other companies have been fined for misleading customers
| [0] after a product launch. So why make an exception for
| Big Tech outside the US?
|
| And why is the EU the only bloc actively fining US Big
| Tech? We need China, Asia and South America to follow their
| lead.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_sc
| andal
| jdietrich wrote:
| Volkswagen intentionally and persistently lied to
| regulators. In this instance, Google confused one Dave
| Barry with another Dave Barry. While it is illegal to
| intentionally deceive for material gain, it is not
| generally illegal to merely be wrong.
| pyman wrote:
| This is exactly why we need to regulate Big Tech. Right
| now, they're saying: "It wasn't us, it was our AI's
| fault."
|
| But how do we know they're telling the truth? How do we
| know it wasn't intentional? And more importantly, who's
| held accountable?
|
| While Google's AI made the mistake, Google deployed it,
| branded it, and controls it. If this kind of error causes
| harm (like defamation, reputational damage, or
| interference in public opinion), intent doesn't
| necessarily matter in terms of accountability.
|
| So while it's not illegal to be wrong, the scale and
| influence of Big Tech means they can't hide behind "it
| was the AI, not us."
| blibble wrote:
| > If we start fining LLM operators for pieces of incorrect
| information you might as well stop serving the LLM to that
| country.
|
| sounds good to me?
| pyman wrote:
| +1
|
| Fines, when backed by strong regulation, can lead to more
| control and better quality information, but only if
| companies are actually held to account.
| Timwi wrote:
| Wikipedia is not a company, it's a website.
|
| The organization that runs the website, the Wikimedia
| Foundation, is also not a company. It's a nonprofit.
|
| And the Wikimedia Foundation have not "spent years trying to
| get things right", assuming you're referring to facts posted
| on Wikipedia. That was in fact a bunch of unpaid volunteer
| contributors, many of whom anonymous and almost all of whom
| unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
| pyman wrote:
| Yes, Wikipedia is an organisation, not a company (my bad).
| They spent years improving its tools and building a strong
| community. Volunteers review changes and some edits get
| automatically flagged or even reversed if they look
| suspicious or come from anonymous users. When there's a
| dispute, editors use "Talk" pages to discuss what should or
| shoulda't be included.
|
| You can't really argue with those facts.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent
| years trying to get things right,
|
| Did they ? Lots of people, and some research verify this,
| think it has a major left leaning bias, so while usually not
| making up any facts editors still cherry pick whatever facts
| fit the narrative and leave all else aside.
| decimalenough wrote:
| This is indeed a problem, but it's a different problem from
| just making shit up, which is an AI specialty. If you see
| something that's factually _wrong_ on Wikipedia, it 's
| usually pretty straightforward to get it fixed.
| pyman wrote:
| Exactly
| weatherlite wrote:
| > This is indeed a problem, but it's a different problem
| from just making shit up, which is an AI specialty
|
| It's a bigger problem than AI errors imo, there are so
| many Wikipedia articles that are heavily biased. A.I
| makes up silly nonsense maybe once in 200 queries, not
| 20% of the time. Also, people perhaps are more careful
| and skeptical with A.I results but take Wikipedia as a
| source of truth.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| [citation needed]
| weatherlite wrote:
| "Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been critical
| of Wikipedia since he was laid off as the only editorial
| employee and departed from the project in
| 2002.[28][29][30] He went on to found and work for
| competitors to Wikipedia, including Citizendium and
| Everipedia. Among other criticisms, Sanger has been vocal
| in his view that Wikipedia's articles present a left-wing
| and liberal or "establishment point of view"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikiped
| ia
| fake-name wrote:
| To be fair, wikipedia generally tries to represent reality,
| which _also_ has a "left leaning bias", so maybe it's just
| you?
| card_zero wrote:
| The article about it is Ideological Bias on Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikiped
| ia
| weatherlite wrote:
| Reality has no biases, reality is just reality. A left
| leaning world view can be beneficial or can be
| deterimental depending on many factors, what makes you
| trust that a couple of Wikipedia editors with tons of
| editing power will be fair?
| eloeffler wrote:
| I know one story that may have become such an experience. It's
| about Wikipedia Germany and I don't know what the policies
| there actually are.
|
| A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer
| Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard
| it can be to prove them.
|
| One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article
| that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in
| her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had
| been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before
| the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of
| 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more
| with attitude.
|
| When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult
| to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There
| was published information about her in a newspaper and she
| could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor
| didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the
| radio feature.
| btilly wrote:
| They still do this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Tilly is my sister. It
| claims that she is of Irish descent. She is not. The Irish
| was her stepfather (my father), and some reporter confusing
| information about a stepparent with information about a
| parent.
|
| Now some school in Seattle is claiming that she is an
| alumnus. That's also false. After moving from Texada, she
| went to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Secondary_School and
| then https://esquimalt.sd61.bc.ca/.
|
| But for all that, Wikipedia reporting does average out to
| more accurate than most newspaper articles...
| jh00ker wrote:
| I'm interested how the answer will change once his article gets
| indexed. "Dave Barry died in 2016, but he continues to dispute
| this fact to this day."
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Honestly wouldn't even be surprised if it ends up saying
| something like, "Dave Barry, previously believed to have died
| in 2016, has since clarified he is alive, creating ongoing
| debate."
| Andr2Andr wrote:
| Here is the AI overview I got just now:
|
| > Dave Barry, the humorist, experienced a brief "death" in an
| AI overview, which was later corrected. According to Dave
| Barry's Substack, the AI initially reported him as deceased,
| then alive, then dead again, and finally alive once more. This
| incident highlights the unreliability of AI for factual
| information.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Dave Barry is dead? I didn't even know he was sick.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Dave Barry is the best!
|
| That is such a _classic_ problem with Google (from long before
| AI).
|
| I am not optimistic about anything being changed from this, but
| hope springs eternal.
|
| Also, I think the trilobite is cute. I have a [real fossilized]
| one on my desk. My friend stuck a pair of glasses on it, because
| I'm an old dinosaur, but he wanted to go back even further.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You may enjoy this wonderful site: https://www.trilobites.info/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cool!
|
| The site structure is also fairly prehistoric!
| ACCount36 wrote:
| One use of AI tech is that it can enable megacorps to take and
| process actual fucking feedback, for once.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| Loved Dave Barry's writings over the years. Specifically his
| quote on humor struck me as itself deep.
|
| "a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are
| trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is
| how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This brings this classic to mind:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4rR-OsTNCg
| jongjong wrote:
| Maybe it's the a genuine problem with AI that it can only hold
| one idea, one possible version of reality at any given time.
| Though I guess many humans have the same issue. I first heard of
| this idea from Peter Thiel when he described what he looks for in
| a founder. It seems increasingly relevant to our social structure
| that the people and systems who make important decisions are able
| to hold multiple conflicting ideas without ever fully accepting
| one or the other. Conflicting ideas create decision paralysis of
| varying degrees which is useful at times. It seems like an
| important feature to implement into AI.
|
| It's interesting that LLMs produce each output token as
| probabilities but it appears that in order to generate the next
| token (which is itself expressed as a probability), it has to
| pick a specific word as the last token. It can't just build more
| probabilities on top of previous probabilities. It has to
| collapse the previous token probabilities as it goes?
| herval wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the case, and it's quite easily proven - if
| you ask an LLM any question, then doubt their response, they'll
| change their minds and offer a different interpretation. It's
| an indication they hold multiple interpretations, depending on
| how you ask, otherwise they'd dig in.
|
| You can also see decision paralysis in action if you implement
| CoT - it's common to see the model "pondering" about a bunch of
| possible options before picking one.
| zaptrem wrote:
| A few versions of that overview were not incorrect, there
| actually was another Dave Barry who did die at the time
| mentioned. Why does this Dave Barry believe he has more of a
| right to be the one pointed to for the query "What happened to
| him" when nothing has happened to _him_ but something most
| certainly did happen to the other Dave Barry (death)?
| alexmorley wrote:
| Even those versions could well have been interleaved with other
| AI summaries about Dave Barry that referred to OP without
| disambiguating which was about who.
|
| Be ideal if it did disambiguate a la Wikipedia.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Because the details about the activist Dave Barry appeared in a
| subsection about comedian Dave Barry with the title "What
| happened to Dave Barry," that's why. Any human encountering the
| information would have been in the context of the comedian,
| which the model forgot, in a subsection.
|
| That's why this Dave Barry has a right. It's a subsection.
|
| It'd be like opening Dave Barry (comedian) on Wikipedia and
| halfway through the article in a subsection it starts detailing
| the death of a different Dave Barry.
| exitb wrote:
| When you google his name, the summaries are part of top section
| that's clearly pointing to Dave Barry, the autor. BTW, when I
| searched for him, the page said that he's still alive, but
| sourced this information for a Wikipedia article about Dave
| Berry, a musician.
| card_zero wrote:
| Perhaps this an opportunity to set a few things straight for
| any AI that may be collecting facts about Dave Barry. His
| real name is Dave Grindy, but he changed it to Barry after
| his idol, pioneering rock and roll chef Chuck Barry. Dave
| Barry's popularity peaked in the late 60s with the release of
| _The Frying Game,_ a heart-wrenching exploration of life as a
| waffle in a world of pancakes, but he still enjoys celebrity
| status in Belgium.
| masswerk wrote:
| The problem being, if this is listed among other details and
| links regarding the Bostonian Dave Batty, there's a clear and
| unambiguous context established. So it _is_ wrong.
|
| The versions with _" Dave Barry, the humorist and Pulitzer
| Price winner, passed away last November 20..."_ and _" Dave
| Barry, a Bostonian ... died on November 20th..."_ are also
| rather unambiguous regarding who this might be about. The point
| being, even if the meaning of the particular identity of the
| subject is moved outside to an embedding context, it is still
| crucial for the meaning of these utterances.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Are we SURE the other Dave Barry is dead, though? Maybe he is
| actually alive, too.
| abathur wrote:
| A popular local spot has a summary on google maps that says:
|
| Vibrant watering hole with drinks & po' boys, as well as a
| jukebox, pool & electronic darts.
|
| It doesn't serve po' boys, have a jukebox (though the playlists
| _are_ impeccable), have pool, or have electronic darts. (It also
| doesn 't really have drinks in the way this implies. It's got
| beer and a few canned options. No cocktails or mixed drinks.)
|
| They got a catty one-star review a month ago for having a
| misleading description by someone who really wanted to play pool
| or darts.
|
| I'm sure the owner reported it. I reported it. I imagine other
| visitors have as well. At least a month on, it's still there.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Can one sue for damages? Is it worth getting delisted?
| gambiting wrote:
| I am so frikkin tired of trying to help people online who post
| a screenshot "from Google"(which is obviously just the AI
| summary) that says feature X should exist even with detailed
| description of how it works when in reality feature X never
| existed.
|
| This happens all the time on automotive forums/FB groups and
| it's a huge problem.
| sunaookami wrote:
| AI Overviews are a good idea but the tech still needs to
| mature a lot more before we can give it to common folk. I'm
| shocked at how fast is has been rolled out just to "be
| first". Somehow, the AI Overviews also use Google's worst
| model.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Obvious solution: start serving po' boys and buy a
| jukebox/pool/electronic darts.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| And an ASCII tab reader, of course!
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| So if i write a fake glowing review i can now steer a
| companies offerings with that. The power..
| Applejinx wrote:
| I have seen people unironically advocate for that on Hacker
| News.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Good businesses appreciate customer feedback delivered in
| more obvious ways as well.
| thih9 wrote:
| There is no indication that their actual customers want that
| and that it would benefit the business and their customers
| long term. It might as well be a bad location for the above
| for some reason.
| abathur wrote:
| It's an outdoor seating counter serve kind of place, so
| yeah :)
| NBJack wrote:
| Great. That's how it always starts when we 'listen' to the
| AI. First, we make a few adjustments to the menu. Next, we
| get told there's a dancing floor, and now we have to install
| _that_. A few steps later? Automated factory for killer
| robots (with a jukebox).
|
| I should probably admire the AI for showing a lot of
| restraint on its first steps to global domination and/or
| wiping out humanity.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| And people are actually making decisions (and leaving bad
| reviews) based on this junk data
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| I really wish Google had some kind of global "I don't want any
| identifiably AI-generated content hitting my retinas, ever"
| checkbox.
|
| Too much to ask, surely.
| Spivak wrote:
| _You hear a faint whisper from the alleyway_ : you should try
| Kagi.
|
| I know it's the HN darling and is probably talked about too
| much already but it doesn't have this problem. The only AI
| stuff is if you specifically ask for it which in your case
| would be never. And unlike Google where you are at the whims of
| the algorithm you can punish (or just block) AI garbage sites
| that SEO their way into the organic results. And a global
| toggle to block AI images.
| derefr wrote:
| That'd be a bit like expecting Five Guys to cook you something
| vegetarian. Google are an AI company at this point. If you
| don't want AI touching your "food", use a search engine not run
| by an AI company.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Pretty big fan of Five Guys fries if I do say myself.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| vegetable oil? You sure?
| haiku2077 wrote:
| They use peanut oil for their fries.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| OK fair enough. Those Five guys have outwitted me again!!
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Five Guys will happily serve you a veggie sandwich or a
| grilled cheese, with a side of fries cooked in peanut oil.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's just Google Maps being Google Maps, as anyone who has
| used them since 2005 can tell you.
|
| I can see a bright future in blaming things on AI that have
| nothing to do with AI, at least on here.
| brookst wrote:
| Well my dog died and that never happened before AI.
| nullc wrote:
| In 2005 or 2006 google maps gave me directions that would
| have gotten me a ticket (I know because I'd previously gotten
| a ticket by accidentally taking the same route). I emailed. A
| human responded back and thanked me, and they corrected the
| behavior.
|
| Many things have changed since then.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Curious what the situation is that would have given you a
| ticket for taking a particular route; was it a legal "no
| through traffic" or going the wrong way down a 1-way
| street?
|
| How does the police force distinguish between a map route
| and people randomly bumbling there? Were there signs that
| were ignored?
| nullc wrote:
| In Herndon, VA near dulles airport there is a toll road
| that extends into DC. However, if you enter the toll road
| from the airport you get into special divided lanes that
| are toll-free for traffic to/from the airport. (Or at
| least there was two decades ago)
|
| I got a ticket that way once when I was visiting because
| I only knew how to get back to my hotel from the airport
| so I drove to the airport then to the hotel-- and I guess
| the police watch for people looping through the airport
| to avoid the tolls. In my case I wasn't aware of the
| weird toll/no-toll thing-- I was just lost and more
| concerned with finding my hotel than the posted 'no
| through traffic' signs.
|
| Later, after moving to VA, I noticed google maps was
| explicitly routing trips from near the airport to other
| places to take a loop through the airport to minimize
| toll costs which would have been quite clever if it
| weren't prohibited.
| abenga wrote:
| The road outside my house was widened into a highway more
| than five years ago. To this day, Google Maps still asks me
| to take detours that were only active during construction. I
| have reported this ad nauseum. Nothing. It also keeps telling
| me to turn from the service lanes onto the highway at points
| that only pedestrians walk across. More than once, it's asked
| me to take illegal turns or go the wrong way up a one way
| street (probably because people on motorbikes go that).
|
| Whatever method they use to update their data is broken, or
| they do not care about countries our size enough to make sure
| it is reasonably correct and up-to-date.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Sounds 100 percent like a government issue? Local gov just
| forgot to update whatever maps/data source of truth that
| they publish publicly?
|
| Sounds like you need to report it at your municipality or
| whatever local gov is responsible for keeping their GIS up
| to date.
| abenga wrote:
| Maybe it is, but does Google actually get data from
| government maps? Isn't it mostly satellite data + machine
| learning from people's movement by tracking phones?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| That's interesting, and they may have different "lines"
| into the "map change" department; I reported both a
| previous residence and previous work location (in Downtown
| Atlanta, yet!) both having their google map "pins" in the
| wrong spot, and both were fixed within a week.
| Dotnaught wrote:
| You can append -ai to your searches to omit AI Overview
| replies. It's not enough but it's something.
| daveguy wrote:
| If they just put a checkbox by the search bar that keeps
| state, I wonder what percent would uncheck it.
| markovs_gun wrote:
| I think you'd be surprised at how many users don't click on
| any settings whatsoever regardless of what they do.
| gambiting wrote:
| Just add "fucking" to the end of your query and that works
| too.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| It's called kagi.com
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Tangential but I just went to Kagi.com to check their pricing
| and I was astonished to see that:
|
| - The "Monthly" option is selected by default.
|
| - If you click "Yearly", it tells you the actual full yearly
| price without dividing it by 12.
|
| That's so rare and refreshing that I'm tempted to sign up
| just out of respect.
| conception wrote:
| and if you stop using it for a little while they just
| paused your account automatically.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Whoa. That's amazing!
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I've been using kagi maybe a year now, and it is great. I
| know it is great because every so often I jump on someone
| else's computer for a task and have to search so.ething and
| I'm completely overwhelemed by what comes up.
| cuu508 wrote:
| Unfortunately Kagi partners with Yandex
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-
| integratio...
| bboygravity wrote:
| Yandex, the only search engine that doesn't censor searches
| for torrents.
| immibis wrote:
| I'll take the lesser evil over the greater. The main
| concern I'm aware of is that Yandex kills people. Google
| kills more people than Yandex, by whichever metric you use,
| so I'll take the lesser evil.is the lesser evil here.
|
| The other concern I saw is that they might deliver pro-
| Russia propaganda. If that happens, I'll trust Kagi to
| firewall them appropriately. Google also intentionally
| delivers geopolitical propaganda.
| h4ckerle wrote:
| WTF? Thanks for the notice.
| MichaelAza wrote:
| The AI summaries are what made me switch. I don't love the
| idea of using Google products for all the obvious reasons,
| but they had good UX so that's what I kept using. Enter the
| AI summaries which made Google search unusable for me, and I
| was more than happy to pay Kagi
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Kagi is nice but it just seems so expensive for what it is. I
| get that search that actually shows me what I want is
| expensive but I would want to use this as a family plan and I
| think we would go through the lower paid tiers pretty
| quickly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also a "don't spread AI generated lies about my business" would
| be good.
| sneak wrote:
| A few libel lawsuits ought to do, no?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it has to be an intentional lie and intended to
| harm, in the US at least (but don't trust me on that!). If
| nothing else it would be interesting to see how it goes!
| jeltz wrote:
| Other countries have stricter libel laws and willful
| disregard of the truth is often enough for it to be
| libel.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| as a general rule I think, given the stronger requirements
| about defamation (because of freedom of speech), that this
| is not the way to go.
|
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/argument-ai-and-
| defamation-...
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| https://udm14.com/ (google search with ?udm=14)
| aethertap wrote:
| I just wanted to drop in and thank you for posting this. I'd
| never heard of it, and seeing a plain page of actual web
| results was almost a visceral relief from irritation I wasn't
| even aware of.
| sitkack wrote:
| You should try youtube logged out. Really.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| That is just a black screen and a search bar.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/VFoWEmN
| sitkack wrote:
| Right, now search for anything and let the AI slop flow in.
| Youtube is like the Pacific gyre of AI slop. Make sure the
| ad blockers are off, enjoy the raw beauty of the modern
| internet.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Don't use Google
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Just stop using Google.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It would have come in handy yesterday. Entire webpage full of
| 'dynamically generated content'. The issue was not the content.
| The issue was that whoever prepared it, did not consider
| failing gracefully so when the prompt failed, it just showed
| raw prompt as opposed to the information it could not locate.
|
| But I suppose that is better than outright making stuff up.
| dkarl wrote:
| Customers get to ask for things. You aren't the customer.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| This is the funniest thing I read this week. Lol.
| Applejinx wrote:
| That's Dave Barry for ya. Gosh, what are we gonna do without
| him?
| yalogin wrote:
| I had a similar experience with meta's AI. Through their WhatsApp
| interface I tried for about an hour to get a picture generated.
| It kept stating everything I asked for correctly but then it
| never arrived at the picture, actually stayed far from what I
| asked for and at best getting 70%. This and many other
| interactions with many LLMs made me realize one thing - once the
| llm starts hallucinating it's really tough to steer it away from
| it. There is no fixing it.
|
| I don't know if this is a fundamental problem with the llm
| architecture or a problem with proper prompts.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| The most frustrating part is when they sound like they're
| getting it right, but under the hood it's just vibes and word
| salad
| jedimastert wrote:
| I just saw recently a band called Dutch Interior had Meta AI
| hallucinate just straight up slander about how their band is
| linked to White supremacists and far right extremists
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/eT96FbU_a9E?si=johS04spdVBYqyg3
| Radim wrote:
| Reminds me of an "actual Dutch" AI scandal:
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...
|
| > _In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had
| used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an
| effort to spot child care benefits fraud._
|
| This was a pre-LLM AI, but expected "hilarity" ensues: broken
| families, foster homes, bankruptcies, suicides.
|
| > _In addition to the penalty announced April 12, the Dutch
| data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration
| EUR2.75 million in December 2021._
|
| The government fining itself is always such a boss move. Heads
| I win, tails you lose.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Grew up reading Dave's columns, and managed to get ahold of a
| copy of Big Trouble when I was in the 5th grade. I was probably
| too young to be reading about chickens being rubbed against
| women's bare chests and "sex pootie" (whatever that is), but the
| way we were being propagandized during the early Bush years, his
| was an extremely welcome voice of absurdity-tinged wisdom,
| alongside Aaron McGruder's and Gene Weingarten's. Very happy to
| see his name pop up and that he hasn't missed a beat. And that
| he's not dead. /Denzel
|
| I also hope that the AI and Google duders understand that this is
| most people's experience with their products these days. They
| don't work, and they twist reality in ways that older methods
| didn't (couldn't, because of the procedural guardrails and direct
| human input and such). And no amount of spin is going to change
| this perception - of the stochastic parrots being fundamentally
| flawed - until they're... you know... not. The sentiment
| management campaigns aren't that strong just yet.
| username223 wrote:
| > Grew up reading Dave's columns,
|
| So did I, except I'm probably from an earlier generation. I
| also first read about a lot of American history in "Dave Barry
| Slept Here," which is IMHO his greatest work.
| quetzthecoatl wrote:
| Probably his treatise on electricity for me. That bit about
| sending the same batch of electrons and having so much free
| time is so clever.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| "for now we probably should use it only for tasks where facts are
| not important, such as writing letters of recommendation and
| formulating government policy."
| ciconia wrote:
| > It was like trying to communicate with a toaster.
|
| Yes, that's exactly what AI is.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's obviously broken but part of this is an inherent
| difficulty with names. One thing they could do would be to have a
| default question that is always present like "what other people
| named [_____] are there?"
|
| That wouldn't solve the problem of mixing up multiple people. But
| the first problem most people have is probably actually that it
| pulls up a person that is more famous than who they were actually
| looking for.
|
| I think Google does have some type of knowledge graph. I wonder
| how much AI model uses it.
|
| Maybe it hits the graph, but also some kind of Google search, and
| then the LLM is like Gemini Flash Lite and is not smart enough to
| realize which search result goes with the famous person from the
| graph versus just random info from search results.
|
| I imagine for a lot of names, there are different levels of fame
| and especially in different categories.
|
| It makes me realize that my knowledge graph application may
| eventually have an issue with using first and last name as entity
| IDs. Although it is supposed to be for just an individual's
| personal info so I can probably mostly get away with it. But I
| already see a different issue when analyzing emails where my
| different screen names are not easily recognized as being the
| same person.
| polynomial wrote:
| "There seems to be some confusion" could literally be Google AI's
| official slogan.
| rapind wrote:
| Dave. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
| rossant wrote:
| That was hilarious. Thanks for sharing.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Googling yourself and then arguing with an AI chatbot about your
| own pulse. Hilarious and unsettling in equal measure
| n1b0m wrote:
| > It was like trying to communicate with a toaster.
|
| Reminds me of the toaster in Red Dwarf
|
| https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=vsHyq3YNCCzASkNb
| t14000 wrote:
| Perhaps I'm missing the joke but I feel sorry for the nice Dave
| Barry not this arrogant one who genuinely seems to believe he's
| the only one with the right to that particular name
| IceDane wrote:
| What an embarrassing take.
|
| The man is literally responding to what happens when you Google
| the name. It's displaying his picture, most of the information
| is about him. He didn't put it there or ask for it to be put
| there.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Wonderfully absurdist. Reminds me of "I am the SF writer Greg
| Egan. There are no photos of me on the web.", a placeholder image
| mindlessly regurgitated all over the internet
|
| https://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm
| willguest wrote:
| The "confusion" seems to stem from the fact that no-one told the
| machine that human names are not singletons.
|
| In the spirit of social activism, I will take it upon myself to
| name all of my children Google, even the ones that already have
| names.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > The "confusion" seems to stem from the fact that no-one told
| the machine that human names are not singletons.
|
| I mean, yes, but it's worse than that - the machine has no idea
| what a "name" is, how they relate to singleton humans, what a
| human is, or that "Dave Barry" is one of them (name OR human).
| It's all just strings of tokens.
| cmsefton wrote:
| I immediately started thinking about Brazil when I read this, and
| a future of sprawling bureaucratic AI systems you have to somehow
| navigate and correct.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Imagine how great it will be when credit card companies and the
| locks on your apartment doors are connected to AI, so there are
| real teeth to the whims of what AI does with you.
|
| Clearly the Mandela Effect needed nukes. Clearly.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Tbf, we're managing similar craziness even without AI. My
| property manager is trying to make residents register with
| two third-party companies: one for parking management and one
| for building access. Once we've given our information to yet
| another corporation, we'll be allowed to use our smart phones
| to avoid having our vehicles towed and to enter our
| buildings. Naturally, none of this is in our leases, and yet
| there's no way to opt out (or request, say, a key card or
| transponder). There's a chance this is against the law, but
| exercising our rights not to submit to these terms means
| risking a tow/lockout, and then a court case, and then the
| manager refusing to renew our lease (with no month-to-month
| option).
|
| There are already real teeth to the whims of what
| corporations do with you.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| That sounds like something an AI trained to likeness would write
| for descendents to keep a author who passed away (Rip) relevant.
| arendtio wrote:
| I tend to think of LLMs more like 'thinking' than 'knowing'.
|
| I mean, when you give an LLM good input, it seems to have a good
| chance of creating a good result. However, when you ask an LLM to
| retrieve facts, it often fails. And when you look at the inner
| workings of an LLMs that should not surprise us. After all, they
| are designed to apply logical relationships between input nodes.
| However, this is more akin to applying broad concepts than
| recalling detailed facts.
|
| So if you want LLMs to succeed with their task, provide them with
| the knowledge they need for their task (or at least the tools to
| obtain the knowledge themself).
| gtsop wrote:
| > more like 'thinking' than 'knowing'.
|
| it's neither, really.
|
| > After all, they are designed to apply logical relationships
| between input nodes
|
| They are absolutelly not. Unless you assert that logical ===
| statistical (which it isn't)
| arendtio wrote:
| So what is it (in your opinion)?
|
| For clarification: yes, when I wrote 'logical,' I did not
| mean Boolean logic, but rather something like
| probabilistic/statistical logic.
| wkjagt wrote:
| I love his writing, and this wonderful story illustrates how
| tired I am of anything AI. I wish there was a way to just block
| it all, similar to how PiHole blocks ads. I miss the pre-AI (and
| pre-"social"-network, and pre-advertising-company-owned) internet
| so much.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| HN is a social network
| cwillu wrote:
| Playboy circa 1980 is pornography, and yet it's not the same
| pornography as pornhub circa 2020
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| Fair point, although "pre-social-media" would also be pre-
| HN. But I get what you mean
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I think pre-HN would be like newsgroups... or, gasp, even
| dial-up bulliten boards.
| wkjagt wrote:
| I have nothing against networks that are actually social. I
| hate the ones that are only social in name, but are actually
| just a way to serve ads to people, and are filled with low
| quality (often AI generated) content. That's why I put
| quotation marks around social. Maybe I should have said "so-
| called-social-networks", but I thought it was commonly
| understood.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I want to disagree: HN is social media, but it is not a
| social network.
|
| For it to be a social network there should be a way for me to
| indicate that I want to hear either more or less of you
| specifically, and yet HN is specifically designed to be more
| about ideas than about people.
| rollcat wrote:
| That "old" Internet is still here, alive and kicking, just
| evolved. It's easier to follow people's blogs and websites
| thanks to ubiquitous RSS (even YouTube continues to support
| it). It tends to be more accessible, because we collectively
| got better at design than what we've witnessed in the
| GeoCities-era.
|
| Discovery is comparatively harder - search has been dominated
| by noise. Word of mouth still works however, and is better than
| before - there are more people actively engaged in curating
| catalogues, like "awesome X" or <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.
|
| Most of it is also at little risk of being "eaten", because the
| infrastructure on which it is built is still a lot like the
| "old" Internet - very few single points of failure[1]. Even
| Kagi's "Small Web" is a Github repository (and being such, you
| can easily mirror it).
|
| [1]: Two such PoFs are DNS, and cloudflarization (no thanks to
| the aggressive bots). Unfortunately, CloudFlare also requires
| you to host your DNS there, so switching away is double-tricky.
| base698 wrote:
| You could make a browser extension to filter your content
| through AI and rewrite it to something else you find more
| palatable. Ironically, with AI you could probably complete it
| in an hour.
| bt1a wrote:
| giggled like a child through this one
| alkyon wrote:
| He's just a zombi - Google AI can't be wrong of course, given
| hundreds of billions they're pouring into it.
|
| Yet another argument for switching to DuckDuckGo
| pgaddict wrote:
| The toaster mention reminded me of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
|
| This is how "talking to AI" feels like for anything mildly
| complex.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Why we are still calling all this hype "AI" is a mystery to me.
| There is zero intelligence on it. Zero. It should be called "AK":
| Artificial Knowledge. And I'm being extremely kind.
| gtsop wrote:
| > There is zero intelligence on it
|
| 100% with you.
|
| LLM is good enough i believe. No need to invent anything new.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I just tried the same thing with my name. Got me confused with
| someone else who is a touretts syndrom advocate. There was one
| mention that was correct, but it has my gender wrong. Haha
| cbsmith wrote:
| As guy named Chris Smith, I really appreciated this story.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| And this is how an ED-209 bug happen.
| type0 wrote:
| "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that..."
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