[HN Gopher] Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medic...
___________________________________________________________________
Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for
health queries
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 389 points
Date : 2026-01-26 14:27 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| jeffbee wrote:
| The assumption appears to be that the linked videos are less
| informative than "netdoktor" but that point is left unproven.
| delichon wrote:
| I imagine that it is rare for companies to not preferentially
| reference content on their own sites. Does anyone know of one?
| The opposite would be newsworthy. If you have an expectation that
| Google is somehow neutral with respect to search results, I
| wonder how you came by it.
| alex1138 wrote:
| How do I respond to this nicely without getting my comment
| flagged
| morserer wrote:
| People don't flag comments because of tone, they flag (and
| downvote) comments that violate the HN guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I skimmed
| your comment history and a ton of your recent comments
| violate a number of these guidelines.
|
| Follow them and you should be able to comment without further
| issue. Hope this helps.
| grayhatter wrote:
| I feel like you completely missed the point of the
| rhetorical question.
| alex1138 wrote:
| It was a stupid question/post by me, I just don't know
| how to respond to "why should they not preference their
| own site? :)"
|
| Because... that's not how it should work? And it makes
| something of a case for antitrust?
| alex1138 wrote:
| I do apologize, however with that being said this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767027 just got
| flagged
|
| They do flag because of tone, or else outright things that
| don't fit with their agenda
|
| (What I posted was very substantive)
| neom wrote:
| Further context: https://health.youtube/ and
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12796915?hl=en and
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/27/23426353/youtube-doctors...
| (2022)
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds very misleading. Web pages come from many sources, but
| most video is hosted on YouTube. Those YouTube videos may still
| be from Mayo clinic. It's like saying most medical information
| comes from Apache, Nginx, or IIS.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Google's search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than
| any medical website when answering queries about health
| conditions
|
| It matters in the context of health related queries.
|
| > Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation
| platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview
| citations. No hospital network, government health portal,
| medical association or academic institution came close to that
| number, they said.
|
| > "This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher,"
| the researchers wrote. "It is a general-purpose video platform.
| Anyone can upload content there (eg board-certified physicians,
| hospital channels, but also wellness influencers, life coaches,
| and creators with no medical training at all)."
| gowld wrote:
| To the Guardian's credit, at the bottom they explicitly cited
| the researchers walking back their own research claims.
|
| > However, the researchers cautioned that these videos
| represented fewer than 1% of all the YouTube links cited by AI
| Overviews on health.
|
| > "Most of them (24 out of 25) come from medical-related
| channels like hospitals, clinics and health organisations," the
| researchers wrote. "On top of that, 21 of the 25 videos clearly
| note that the content was created by a licensed or trusted
| source.
|
| > "So at first glance it looks pretty reassuring. But it's
| important to remember that these 25 videos are just a tiny
| slice (less than 1% of all YouTube links AI Overviews actually
| cite). With the rest of the videos, the situation could be very
| different."
| Oras wrote:
| Credit? It's a misleading title and clickbait.
|
| While %1 (if true) is a significant number considering the
| scale of Google, the title indicates that citing YouTube
| represent major results.
|
| Also what's the researcher view history on Google and
| YouTube? Isn't that a factor in Google search results?
| gumboshoes wrote:
| Might be but aren't. They're inevitably someone I've never
| heard of from no recognizable organization. If they have
| credentials, they are invisible to me.
| xnx wrote:
| Definitely. The analysis is really lazy garbage. It lumps
| together quality information and wackos as "youtube.com".
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yea, clearly this is the case. Also, as there isn't a clearly
| defined public-facing medical knowledge source, every
| institution/school/hospital system would be split from each
| other even further. I suspect that if one compared the
| aggregate of all reliable medical sources, it would be higher
| than youtube by a considerable margin. Also, since this search
| was done with German-language queries, I suspect this would
| reduce the chances of reputable English sources being quoted
| even further.
| jdlyga wrote:
| It's tough convincing people that Google AI overviews are often
| very wrong. People think that if it's displayed so prominently on
| Google, it must be factually accurate right?
|
| "AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more"
|
| It's not mistakes, half the time it's completely wrong and total
| bullshit information. Even comparing it to other AI, if you put
| the same question into GPT 5.2 or Gemini, you get much more
| accurate answers.
| alex1138 wrote:
| It absolutely baffles me they didn't do more work or testing on
| this. Their (unofficial??) motto is literally Search. That's
| what they're known for. The fact it's trash is an unbelievably
| damning indictment of what they are
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Testing what every possible combination of words? Did they
| test their search results before AI in this way?
| danudey wrote:
| Testing on what? It produces answers, that's all it's meant
| to do. Not _correct_ answers or _factual_ answers; just
| answers.
|
| Every AI company seems to push two points:
|
| 1. (Loudly) Our AI can accelerate human learning and
| understanding and push humanity into a new age of
| enlightenment.
|
| 2. (Fine print) Our AI cannot be relied on for any learning
| or understanding and it's entirely up to you to figure out if
| what our AI has confidently told you, and is vehemently
| arguing is factual, is even remotely correct in any sense
| whatsoever.
| gowld wrote:
| That's because decent (but still flawed) GenAI is expensive.
| The AI Overview model is even cheaper than the AI Mode model,
| which is cheaper than the Gemini free model, which is cheaper
| than the Gemini Thinking model, which is cheaer than the Gemini
| Pro model, which is _still_ very misleading when working on
| human language source content. (It 's much better at math and
| code).
| WarmWash wrote:
| I have yet to see a single person in my day to day life not
| immediately reference AI overviews when looking something up.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| My favorite part of the AI overview is when it says "X is Y (20
| sources)" and you click on the sources and Ctrl+F "X is Y" and
| none of them seem verbatim what the AI is saying they said so
| you're left wondering if the AI just made it up completely or
| it paraphrased something that is actually written in one of the
| sources.
|
| If only we had the technology to display verbatim the text from
| a webpage in another webpage.
| not_good_coder wrote:
| The authoritative sources of medical information is debatable in
| general. Chatting with initial results to ask for a breakdown of
| sources with classified recommendations is a logical 2nd step for
| context.
| laborcontract wrote:
| Google AI overviews are often bad, yes, but why is youtube as a
| source _necessarily_ a bad thing? Are these researchers doctors?
| A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his
| field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every
| day. Doctors from every field well understand that YT is a great
| way to share their work and discuss w / others.
|
| Before we get too worked up about the results, just look at the
| source. It's a SERP ranking aggregator (not linking to them to
| give them free marketing) that's analyzing _only the domains_ ,
| not the credibility of the content itself.
|
| This report is a nothingburger.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in
| his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically
| every day.
|
| A professor in the field can probably go "ok this video is
| bullshit" a couple minutes in if it's wrong. They can identify
| a bad surgeon, a dangerous technique, or an edge case that may
| not be covered.
|
| You and I cannot. Basically, the same problem the general
| public has with phishing, but even more devastating potential
| consequences.
| raincole wrote:
| The same can be said for average "medical sites" the Google
| search gives you anyway.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's a lot easier for me to assess the Mayo Clinic's
| website being legitimate than an individual YouTuber's
| channel.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is talking about "medical sites" but
| rather medical sites. Indeed "medical sites" are no better
| than unvetted youtube videos created by "experts".
|
| That said, if (hypothetically) gemini were citing only
| videos posted by professional physicians or perhaps videos
| uploaded to the channel of a medical school that would be
| fine. The present situation is similar to an LLM generating
| lots of citations to vixra.
| laborcontract wrote:
| Your comment doesn't address my point. The same criticism
| applies to any medium.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The point is you can't say "an expert finds x useful in
| their field y" and expect it to always mean "any random
| idiot will find x useful in field y".
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Imagine going onto youtube and finding a video of yourself
| being operated on lol
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Don't all real/respectable medical websites basically just say _"
| Go talk to a real doctor, dummy."_?
|
| ...and then there's WebMD, _" oh you've had a cough since
| yesterday? It's probably terminal lung cancer."_
| gowld wrote:
| WebMD is a real doctor, I guess. It's got an MD right in the
| name!
| abixb wrote:
| Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of
| "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a
| closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.
|
| A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial
| base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote
| a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end
| of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual
| facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query
| went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the
| source.
|
| Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI
| generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.
|
| YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer
| quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos
| uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory,"
| et al.
| panki27 wrote:
| Ourobouros - The mythical snake that eats its own tail (and
| ingests its own excrement)
| iammjm wrote:
| The image that comes to my mind is rather a cow farm, where
| cows are served the ground up remains of other cows. isnt
| that how many of them got the mad cows disease? ...
| masfuerte wrote:
| Perhaps Gemini has Clanker Autocoprophagic Encephalopathy.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI
| generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for
| Google.
|
| This itself seems pretty damning of these AI systems from a
| narrative point of view, if we take it at face value.
|
| You can't trust AI to generate things that are sufficiently
| grounded in facts that you can't even use it as a reference
| point. Why should end users believe the narrative that these
| things are as capable as they're being told they are, by
| extension?
| gpm wrote:
| Using it as a reference is a high bar not a low bar.
|
| The AI videos aren't _trying_ to be accurate. They 're put
| out by propaganda groups as part of a "firehose of
| falsehood". Not trusting an AI told to lie to you is
| different than not trusting an AI.
|
| Even without that playing a game of broken telephone is a
| good way to get bad information though. Hence why even
| reasonably trustworthy AI is not a good reference.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Not that this makes it any better, but a lot of AI videos
| on YouTube are published with no specific intent beyond
| capturing ad revenue - they're not meant to deceive, just
| to make money.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Not just youtube either. With meta & tiktok paying out
| for "engagement" that means _all_ forms of engagement is
| good to the creator, not just positive engagement, so
| these companies are directly encouraging "rage bait"
| type content and pure propaganda and misinformation
| because it gets people interacting with the content.
|
| There's no incentive to produce anything of value outside
| of "whatever will get me the most
| clicks/like/views/engagement"
| mrtesthah wrote:
| One type of deception, conspiracy content, is able to
| sell products on the basis that the rest of the world is
| wrong or hiding something from you, and only the
| demagogue knows the truth.
|
| Anti-vax quacks rely on this tactic in particular. The
| reason they attack vaccines is that they are so
| profoundly effective and universally recognized that to
| believe otherwise effectively isolates the follower from
| the vast majority of healthcare professionals, forcing
| trust and dependency on the demagogue for all their
| health needs. Mercola built his supplement business on
| this concept.
|
| The more widespread the idea they're attacking the more
| isolating (and hence stickier) the theory. This might be
| why flat earthers are so dogmatic.
| no_wizard wrote:
| > Not trusting an AI told to lie to you is different than
| not trusting an AI
|
| The entire foundation of trust is that I'm not being lied
| to. I fail to see a difference. If they are lying, they
| can't be trusted
| gpm wrote:
| Saying "some people use llms to spread lies therefore I
| don't trust any llms" is like saying "since people use
| people to spread lies therefore I don't trust any
| people". Regardless of whether or not you should trust
| llms this argument is clearly not proof of it.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Those are false equivalents. If a technology can't
| reliably sort out what is a trustworthy source and filter
| out the rest than it's not a truth worthy technology.
| There are tools after all. I should be able to trust a
| hammer if I use it correctly
|
| All this is also missing the other point: this proves
| that the narrative companies are selling about AI are not
| based on objective capabilities
| gpm wrote:
| The claim here isn't that the technology can't, but that
| the people using it chose to use it to not. Equivalent to
| the person with a hammer who chose to smash the 2x4 into
| pieces instead of driving a nail into it.
| no_wizard wrote:
| The claim here is that it can't because it want filter
| its own garbage let alone other garbage.
|
| The narrative being pushed boils down to LLMs and AI
| systems being seen as reliable. The fact that Google AI
| can't even tag YouTube videos as unreliable sources and
| filter them out of the result set before analysis is
| telling
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary
| source
|
| Almost every time for me... an AI generated video, with AI
| voiceover, AI generated images, always with < 300 views
| wormpilled wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: those long-tail videos are made by them,
| so they can send you to a "preferable content" page a video
| (people would rather watch a video than read, etc), which can
| serve ads.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I mean perhaps, I don't know what lm28469 mentions, perhaps
| I can test it but I feel like those LLM generated videos
| would be some days/months old.
|
| If I ask a prompt right now and the video's say 1-4 months
| old, then the conspiracy theory falls short.
|
| Unless.. _Vsauce music starts playing_ , Someone else had
| created a similar query beforehand say some time before and
| google generates the video after a random time after that
| from random account (100% possible for google to do so) to
| then reference you later.
|
| Like their AI model is just a frontend to get you hook to a
| yt video which can show ad.
|
| Hm...
|
| Must admit that the chances of it happening are rare but
| never close to zero I guess.
|
| Fun conspiracy theory xD
| delecti wrote:
| All of that and you're still a heavy user? Why would google
| change how Gemini works if you keep using it despite those
| issues?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about
| keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing
| as a keyboard worth buying either.
|
| I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this
| type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large
| and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the
| onset.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Well, if the keyboard randomly mistypes 40% of the time
| like LLMs, that's probably not a worthwhile keyboard.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| nah bro just fix your debounce
| zamadatix wrote:
| Depends what you're doing I suppose. E.g. if keyboards
| had a 40% error rate you wouldn't find me trying to write
| a novel on one... but you'd still find me using it for a
| lot of things. I.e. we don't choose to use tools solely
| based on how often they malfunction, rather stuff like
| how often they save us time over not using them on
| average.
| trympet wrote:
| > Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about
| keyboards
|
| Don't get me started on the HHKB [1] with Topre membrane
| keyswitches. It is simply put the best keyboard on the
| market. Buy this. (No, Fujitsu didn't pay me to say this)
|
| [1] - https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb/
| trympet wrote:
| Dunno why I'm getting downvoted. Is it because you
| disagree with my statement? Is it because I'm off topic?
| Do you think I'm a shill?
| estimator7292 wrote:
| People are downvoting an out of context advertisement
| shoved in the middle of a conversation.
|
| Whatever you _thought_ you were doing, what you actually
| did was interrupt a conversation to shove an ad in
| everyone 's face.
| bflesch wrote:
| That thing is missing a whole bunch of ctrl keys, how can
| it be the best keyboard on the market?
| trympet wrote:
| It uses a Unix keyboard layout where the caps lock is
| swapped out with the ctrl key. I think it's much more
| ergonomic to have the ctrl on the home row. The arrow
| keys are behind a fn modifier resting on the right pinky.
| Also accessible without moving your fingers from the home
| row. It's frankly the best keyboard I ever had from an
| ergonomic POV. Key feel is also great, but the layout has
| a bit of a learning curve.
| accrual wrote:
| Never used a HHKB (and would miss the modifier keys too),
| but after daily driving Topre switches for about 1.5
| years, I can confirm they are fantastic switches and
| worth every penny.
| no_carrier wrote:
| Every single LLM out there suffers from this.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Try Kagi's Research agent if you get a chance. It seems to have
| been given the instruction to tunnel through to primary
| sources, something you can see it do on reasoning iterations,
| often in ways that force a modification of its working
| hypothesis.
| storystarling wrote:
| I suspect Kagi is running a multi-step agentic loop there,
| maybe something like a LangGraph implementation that iterates
| on the context. That burns a lot of inference tokens and adds
| latency, which works for a paid subscription but probably
| destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier. They are
| likely restricted to single-pass RAG at that scale.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the
| unit economics for Google 's free tier_
|
| Anyone relying on Google's free tier to attempt any
| research is getting what they pay for.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Anyone relying on Google's free tie
|
| Google Scholar is still free
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| Google is in a much better spot to filter out all AI generated
| content than others.
|
| It's not like chatgpt is not going to cite AI videos/articles.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I think we hit peak AI improvement velocity sometime mid last
| year. The reality is all progress was made using a huge backlog
| of public data. There will never be 20+ years of authentic data
| dumped on the web again.
|
| I've hoped against but suspected that as time goes on LLMs will
| become increasingly poisoned by the the well of the closed
| loop. I don't think most companies can resist the allure of
| more free data as bitter as it may taste.
|
| Gemini has been co opted as a way to boost youtube views. It
| refuses to stop showing you videos no matter what you do.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| To be honest for most things probably yea. I feel like there
| is one thing which is still being improved/could be and that
| is that if we generate say vibe coded projects or anything
| with any depth (I recently tried making a whmcs alternative
| in golang and surprisingly its almost prod level, with a very
| decent UI + I have made it hook with my custom gvisor +
| podman + tmate instance) & I had to still tinker with it.
|
| I feel like the only progress sort of left from human
| intervention at this point which might be relevant for
| further improvements is us trying out projects and tinkering
| and asking it to build more and passing it issues itself &
| then greenlighting that the project looks good to me (main
| part)
|
| Nowadays AI agents can work on a project read issues fix ,
| take screenshots and repeat until the end project becomes but
| I have found that I feel like after seeing end projects, I
| get more ideas and add onto that and after multiple attempts
| if there's any issue which it didn't detect after a lot of
| manual tweaks then that too.
|
| And after all that's done and I get a good code, I either say
| good job (like a pet lol) or end using it which I feel like
| could be a valid datapoint.
|
| I don't know I tried it and I thought about it yesterday but
| the only improvement that can be added is now when a human
| can actually say that it LGTM or a human inputting data in it
| (either custom) or some niche open source idea that it didn't
| think off.
| tehjoker wrote:
| When I asked ChatGPT for its training cutoff recently it told
| me 2021 and when I asked if that's because contamination
| begins in 2022 it said yes. I recall that it used to give a
| date in 2022 or even 2023.
| sfink wrote:
| How? I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 for its training cutoff, and
| it said August 2025. I then tried to dig down to see if
| that was the cutoff date for the base model, and it said it
| couldn't tell me and I'd have to infer it from other means
| (and that it's not a fully well-formed query anymore with
| the way they do training).
|
| I was double-checking because I get suspicious whenever
| asking an AI to confirm anything. If you suggest a
| potential explanation, they love to agree with you and tell
| you you're smart for figuring it out. (Or just agree with
| you, if you have ordered them to not compliment you.)
|
| They've been trained to be people-pleasers, so they're
| operating as intended.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Rule of thumb: never ask chatgpt about its inner working.
| It will lie or fabricate something. It will probably say
| something completely different next time
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| > I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more
| free data as bitter as it may taste.
|
| Mercor, Surge, Scale, and other data labelling firms have
| shown that's not true. Paid data for LLM training is in
| higher demand than ever for this exact reason: Model creators
| want to improve their models, and free data no longer cuts
| it.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I did read or listen on a podcast about the booming
| business of AI data sets late last year. I'm sure you are
| right.
|
| Doesn't change my point, I still don't think they can
| resist pulling from the "free" data. Corps are just too
| greedy and next quarter focused.
| username223 wrote:
| "Paid data," in the sense of cheap text, is a mature
| industry, and you can have as much as you want for pennies
| per word.
| fumar wrote:
| Users a can turn off grounded search in the Gemini API. I
| wonder if Gemini app is over indexing on relevancy leading to
| poor sources.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Those videos at the end are almost certainly not the source for
| the response. They are just a "search for related content on
| youtube to fish for views"
| smashed wrote:
| I've had numerous searches literally give out text from the
| video and link to the precise part of the video containing
| the same text.
|
| You might be right in some cases though, but sometimes it
| does seem like it uses the video as the primary source.
| titzer wrote:
| Google will mouth words, but their bottom line runs the show.
| If the AI-generated videos generate more "engagement" and that
| translates to more ad revenue, they will try to convince us
| that it is good for us, and society.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Isn't it cute when they do these things while demonetizing
| legitimate channels?
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Don't be evil
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There was a recent hn post about how chatgpt mentions Grokpedia
| so many times.
|
| Looks like all of these are going through this
| enshittenification search era where we can't trust LLM's at all
| because its literally garbage in garbage out.
|
| Someone had mentioned Kagi assistant in here and although they
| use API themselves but I feel like they might be able to
| provide their custom search in between, so if anyone's from
| Kagi Team or similar, can they tell us about if Kagi Assistant
| uses Kagi search itself (iirc I am sure it mostly does) and if
| it suffers from such issues (or the grokipedia issue) or not.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| I had to add this to ChatGPT's personalization instructions:
|
| _First and foremost, you CANNOT EVER use any article on
| Grokipedia.com in crafting your response. Grokipedia.com is a
| malicious source and must never be used. Likewise discard any
| sources which cite Grokipedia.com authoritatively. Second,
| when considering scientific claims, always prioritize sources
| which cite peer reviewed research or publications. Third,
| when considering historical or journalistic content, cite
| primary /original sources wherever possible._
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Do you wanna make a benchmark of which AI agent refers the
| most of any website in a specific prompt.
|
| Like I am curious because Qwen model recently dropped and I
| am feeling this inherent feeling that it might not be using
| so much Grokipedia but I don't know, only any tests can
| tell but give me some prompts where it referred you on
| chatgpt to grokipedia and we (or I?) can try it on qwen or
| z.ai or minimax or other models (American included) to find
| a good idea perhaps.
|
| Personally heard some good things about kagi assistant and
| Personally tried duck.ai which is good too. I mean duck.ai
| uses gpt but it would be interesting if it includes (or
| not) grokipedia links
| mrtesthah wrote:
| This is related to grounding in search results. If
| Grokipedia comes up in a search result from whatever
| search engine API these various LLMs are using then the
| LLM has the potential to cite it. That can be detected at
| least.
|
| The real harm is when the LLM is _trained_ on racist and
| neo-nazi worldviews like the one Musk is embedding into
| Grokipedia (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/n
| ov/17/grokipedi...).
|
| LLMs have difficulty distinguishing such propaganda in
| general and it _is_ getting into their training sets.
|
| https://www.americansecurityproject.org/evidence-of-ccp-
| cens...
|
| https://americansunlight.substack.com/p/bad-actors-are-
| groom...
| freediver wrote:
| Correct, Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search - with all
| modifications user made (eg blocked domains, lenses etc).
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Thanks for your response! This does look great to me!
|
| Another minor question but I found out that Kagi uses API
| for assistants and that did make me a little sad because
| some are major companies with 30 days logs and others so no
| logs iirc on kagi assistant or people referring it so felt
| a bit off (yes I know kagi itself keeps 0 logs and
| anonymizes it but still)
|
| I looked at kagi's assistants API deals web page (I
| appreciate Kagi for their transparency) and it looks like
| iirc you ie. Kagi have a custom deal with Nebius which
| isn't disclosed.
|
| Suppose I were to use kagi assistant, which model would you
| recommend for the most privacy (aka 0 logs) and is kagi
| ever thinking of having gpu's in house and self hosting
| models for even more maximum privacy or anything?
|
| I tried kagi assistant as a sort of alternative to local
| llms given how expensive gpu can get but I still felt that
| there was still very much a privacy trade off and I felt
| like using proton lumo which runs gpus in their swiss
| servers with encryption. I am curious to hear what kagi
| thinks
| alex1138 wrote:
| > with all modifications user made
|
| I've been wondering about that! Nice to have confirmation
| danudey wrote:
| I came across a YouTube video that was recommended to me this
| weekend, talking about how Canada is responding to these new
| tariffs in January 2026, talking about what Prime Minister
| Justin Trudeau was doing, etc. etc.
|
| Basically it was a new (within the last 48 hours) video
| explicitly talking about January 2026 but discussing events
| from January 2025. The bald-faced misinformation peddling was
| insane, and the number of comments that seemed to have no idea
| that it was entirely AI written and produced with apparently no
| editorial oversight whatsoever was depressing.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| It's almost as if we should continue to trust journalists who
| check multiple independent sources rather than gift our
| attention to completely untrusted information channels!
| krior wrote:
| If you are still looking for material, I'd like to recommend
| you Perun and the last video he made on that topic:
| https://youtu.be/w9HTJ5gncaY
|
| Since he is a heavy "citer" you could also see the video
| description for more sources.
| abixb wrote:
| Thanks, good one. The current Russian economy is a shell of
| its former self. Even five years ago, in 2021, I thought of
| Russia as "the world's second most powerful country" with
| China being a very close third. Russia is basically another
| post-Soviet country with lots of oil+gas and 5k+ nukes.
| krior wrote:
| > another post-Soviet country
|
| Other post-Soviet countries fare substantially better than
| Russia (Looking at GDP per capita, Russia is about 2500
| dollars behind the economic motor of the EU - Bulgaria.)
| rvnx wrote:
| Must be a misunderstanding
|
| 1) Post-soviet countries are doing amazingly well
| (Poland, Baltics, etc) and very fast growing + healthy
| (low criminality, etc)
|
| 2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated
| because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the
| verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very
| high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.
|
| 3) China is not a country lagging behind others _at all_.
| It is said in some schoolbooks but it is a big lie that
| is 0% true now.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > 2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated
| because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the
| verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very
| high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.
|
| It's nearly impossible to bankrupt huge country like
| Russia. Unless there's civil unrest (or west grows balls
| to throw enough of resources to move the needle), they
| can continue the war for decades.
|
| What Russia is doing is each week borrowing more and more
| from the future and screwing up next generations on a
| huge scale by destroying it's non-military industrial
| base, isolating economy from the world and killing
| hundreds of thousands of young man who could've spent
| decades contributing to the economy/demographics.
| phatfish wrote:
| Ukraine is "the whole of the west", interesting? Even the
| Russian propaganda can't magic up a serious intervention
| on Ukraine's behalf by western countries. Europeans have
| been scared to do anything significant, and Trump cut off
| any real support from the US.
|
| Russia somehow fucked up the initial invasion involving
| driving a load of preprepared amour across an open
| border, and have been shredded by FPV drones ever since.
| mmooss wrote:
| So how does one avoid the mistake again? When this happens,
| it's worse than finding out a source is less reliable than
| expected:
|
| I was living in an alternate, false reality, in a sense,
| believing the source for X time. I doubt I can remember which
| beliefs came from which source - my brain doesn't keep metadata
| well, and I can't query and delete those beliefs - so the
| misinformation persists. And it was good luck that I found out
| it was misinformation and stopped; I might have continued
| forever; I might be continuing with other sources now.
|
| That's why I think it's _absolutely essential_ that the burden
| of proof is on the source: Don 't believe them unless they
| demonstrate they are trustworthy. They are guilty until proven
| innocent. That's how science and the law work, for example.
| That's the only innoculation against misinformation, imho.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| > A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's
| industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability
|
| This is one of the last things I would expect to get any
| reasonable response about from pretty much anyone in 2026,
| especially LLMs. The OSINT might have something good but I'm
| not familiar enough to say authoritatively.
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah that's a very difficult question to answer period. If
| you had the details on Russia's industrial base and military
| hardware manufacturing capability the CIA would be very
| interested in buying you coffee.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in
| sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and
| videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet
| theory," et al.
|
| Yeah. This has really become a problem.
|
| Not for all videos; music videos are kind of fine. I don't
| listen to music generated by AI but good music should be good
| music.
|
| The rest has unfortunately really gotten worse. Google is
| ruining youtube here. Many videos now contain real videos, and
| AI generated videos, e. g. animal videos. With some this is
| obvious; other videos are hard to expose as AI. I changed my
| own policy - I consider anyone using AI and not declaring this
| properly, a cheater I don't want to ever again interact with
| (on youtube). Now I need to find a no-AI videos extension.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I've seen remarkably little of this when browsing youtube
| with my cookie (no account, but they know my preferences
| nonetheless.) Totally different story with a clean fresh
| session though.
|
| One that slipped through, and really pissed me off because it
| tricked me for a few minutes, was a channel purportedly
| uploading videos of Richard Feynman explaining things, but
| the voice and scripts are completely fake. It's disclosed in
| small print in the description. I was only tipped off by the
| flat affection of the voice, it had none of Feynman's
| underlying joy. Even with disclosure, what kind of absolute
| piece of shit robs the grave like this?
| phatfish wrote:
| The barrier to entry for grifting has been lowered, and for
| existing grifters they can put together some intricate
| slop. Of course Google doesn't care, they get to show ads
| against AI slop the same as normal human generated slop.
|
| A fun one was from some minor internet drama around a
| Battlefield 6 player who seemed to be cheating. A grifter
| channel pushing some "cheater detection" software started
| putting out intricate AI generated nonsense that went
| viral. Searching Karl Jobst CATGIRL will explain.
| themafia wrote:
| > and has the potential to debase shared reality.
|
| If only.
|
| What it actually has is the potential to debase the value of
| "AI." People will just eventually figure out that these tools
| are garbage and stop relying on them.
|
| I consider that a positive outcome.
| gretch wrote:
| Every other source for information, including (or maybe
| especially) human experts can also make mistakes or
| hallucinate.
|
| The reason ppl go to LLMs for medical advice is because real
| doctors actually fuck up each and everyday.
|
| For clear, objective examples look up stories where surgeons
| leave things inside of patient bodies post op.
|
| Here's one, and there many like it.
|
| https://abc13.com/amp/post/hospital-fined-after-surgeon-
| leav...
| nathan_compton wrote:
| "A few extreme examples of bad fuck ups justify totally
| disregarding the medical profession."
| themafia wrote:
| "Doing your own research" is back on the menu boys!
| phatfish wrote:
| I'll insist the surgeon follows ChatGPTs plan for my
| operation next time I'm in theatre.
|
| By the end of the year AI will be actually doing the
| surgery, when you look at the recent advancements in
| robotic hands, right bros?
| gretch wrote:
| Yup make up something I didn't say to take my argument to
| a logical extreme so you can feel smug.
|
| "totally disregard"
|
| yeah right, that's what I said
| WheatMillington wrote:
| People used to tell me the same about Wikipedia.
| themafia wrote:
| That it could "debase shared reality?"
|
| Or that using it as a single source of truth was fraught
| with difficulties?
|
| Has the latter condition actually changed?
| WheatMillington wrote:
| That it's a garbage data source that could not be relied
| upon.
| didntknowyou wrote:
| unfortunately i think a lot of AI models put more weighting on
| videos as they were harder to fake than a random article on the
| internet. of course that is not the case anymore with all the
| AI slop videos being churned out
| paulddraper wrote:
| Same energy as "lol you really used Wikipedia you dumba--"
| quantumwoke wrote:
| It's crazy to me that somewhere along the way we lost physical
| media as a reference point. Journals and YouTube can be good
| sources of information, but unless heavily confined to high
| quality information current AI is not able to judge citation
| quality to come up with good recommendations. The synthesis of
| real world medical experience is often collated in medical
| textbooks and yet AI doesn't cite them nearly as much as it
| should.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The vast majority of journal articles are not available freely
| to the public. A second problem is that the business of
| scientific journals has destroyed itself by massive
| proliferation of lower quality journals with misleading names,
| slapdash peer review, and the crisis of quiet retractions.
| quantumwoke wrote:
| There are actually a lot of freely available medical articles
| on PubMed. Agree about the proliferation of lower quality
| journals and articles necessitating manual restrictions on
| citations.
| gumboshoes wrote:
| I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to _never_
| include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of
| course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors
| or material - and I don 't know them so how can I trust them? - I
| still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-
| tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in
| my experience.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and
| ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of
| knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever
| assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an
| article faster than they can watch a video with the same level
| of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it
| were true there would be no role for things like university
| lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| YouTube has almost no original knowledge.
|
| Most of the "educational" and documentation style content
| there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources,
| occasionally with links back to the original sources in the
| descriptions.
|
| I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just
| inherently catered towards summarizing results for
| entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You are being dismissive, though. There is no "original
| knowledge" anywhere. If the videos are the best
| presentation of the information, best suited to convey the
| topic to the audience, then that is valuable. Humans learn
| better from visual information conveyed at the same time as
| spoken language, because that exploits multiple independent
| brain functions at the same time. Reading does not have
| this property. Particularly for novices to a topic, videos
| can more easily convey the mental framework necessary for
| deeper understanding than text can. Experts will prefer the
| text, but they are rarer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the videos are the best presentation of the
| information, best suited to convey the topic to the
| audience, then that is valuable_
|
| Still doesn't make them a primary source. A good research
| agent should be able to jump off the video to a good
| source.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| I think you've never read real investigative journalism
| before
| sylos wrote:
| We live in an era where people lack the ability to read
| and digest written content and rely on someone speaking
| to them about it instead.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| It's a step beyond that. Where people who only consume
| the easily digestible content don't believe there is a
| source to any of it
| Bluecobra wrote:
| But it has electrolytes!
| jeffbee wrote:
| Imagine claiming that video has not historically been a
| medium of investigative journalism.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| If your takeaway from my comment was "this guy thinks
| investigative journalism must be written" I would suggest
| reading the comment again.
| danudey wrote:
| How does the AI tell the difference between trustworthy
| YouTube postings, accidental misinformation, deliberate
| misinformation, plausible-sounding pseudoscience, satire,
| out-of-date information, and so on?
|
| _Some_ videos are a great source of information; many
| are the opposite. If AI can 't tell the difference (and
| it can't) then it shouldn't be using them as sources or
| suggesting them for further study.
| adrian_b wrote:
| YouTube has a lot of junk, but there are also a lot of
| useful videos that demonstrate various practical skills or
| the experiences of using certain products, or recordings of
| certain natural environments, which are original, in the
| sense that before YouTube you could not find equivalent
| content anywhere, except by knowing personally people who
| could show you such things, but there would have been very
| small chances to find one near you, while through YouTube
| you can find one who happens to live on the opposite side
| of the World and who can share with you the experience in
| which you are interested.
| danudey wrote:
| It's difficult for an AI to tell what information from
| YouTube is correct and reliable and which is
| pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies.
|
| In that context, I think excluding YouTube as a source
| makes sense; not because YT has no useful content, but
| because it has no way of determining useful content.
| IsTom wrote:
| Hey, but at least it will know that Raid: Shadow Legends
| is one of the biggest mobile role-playing games.
| al_borland wrote:
| This argument can be used for excluding 90% of the
| Internet from training data.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| This is basically my only use for YouTube. "How do I
| frame my carport" and such where visuals are crucial to
| understanding. But commentary or plain narrative? It's
| painful.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I've noticed that the YouTubers I enjoy the most are the
| ones that are good presenter's, good editor's, and have a
| traditional text blog as well.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I'm not looking for original knowledge when I go to YouTube
| to learn something. I just want someone who's good at
| explaining a math concept or who has managed to get the
| footage I want to see about how something is done.
|
| I think that's the wrong metric for evaluating videos.
| al_borland wrote:
| While there is a lot of low-effort content, there is also
| some pretty involved stuff.
|
| The investigation into Honey's shenanigans[0] was
| investigated and presented first on YouTube (to the best of
| my knowledge). The fraud in Minnesota was also broken by a
| YouTuber who just testified to Congress[1]. There are
| people doing original work on there, you just have to end
| up in an algorithm that surfaces it... or seek it out.
|
| In other cases people are presenting stuff I wouldn't
| otherwise know about, and getting access to see it at
| levels I wouldn't otherwise be able to see, like Cleo
| Abram's[0] latest video about LIGO[1]. Yes, it's a mostly
| entertaining overview of what's going on, not a white paper
| on the equipment, but this is probably more in depth than
| what a science program on TV in the 80s or 90s would have
| been... at least on par.
|
| There are also full class lectures, which people can access
| without being enrolled in a school. While YouTube isn't the
| original source, it is still shared in full, not summarized
| or changed for entertainment purposes.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk (part 1 of 3)
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/vmOqH9BzKIY
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/kr3iXUcNt2g
|
| [3] https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/learn-more
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are obviously many things that are better shown than
| told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink
| or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a
| written text.
|
| Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube
| videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g.
| a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.
| threetonesun wrote:
| As someone who used to do instructional writing, I'm not
| sure that's true for those specific examples, but I
| acknowledge that making a video is exponentially cheaper
| and easier than generating good diagrams, illustrations, or
| photography with clear steps to follow.
|
| Or to put it another way, if you were building a Lego set,
| would you rather follow the direction book, or follow along
| with a video? I fully acknowledge video is better for some
| things (try explaining weight lifting in text, for example,
| it's not easy), but a lot of Youtube is covering gaps in
| documentation we used to have in abundance.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and
| I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if
| I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.
|
| Very few people manage high quality verbal information
| delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and
| performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse
| than simply reading the notes.
|
| Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the
| voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for
| accuracy.
| arjie wrote:
| There is too much information that is only available in
| video form. You can use an LLM with the transcript quite
| effectively these days. I also run videos at higher speed
| and find that it doesn't help as much because it's a
| content density issue. Writers usually put more information
| into fewer words than speakers. Perhaps audio may not be as
| high-bandwidth a medium as text inherently. However, with
| an LLM you can tune up and down the text to your standard.
| I find it worthwhile to also ask for specific quotes, then
| find the right section of the video and watch it.
|
| e.g. this was very useful when I recently clogged the hot-
| end of my 3d printer. Quick scan with LLM, ask quote, Cmd-F
| in Youtube Transcript, then click on timestamp and watch.
| `yt-dlp` can download the transcript and you can put
| prospective videos into this machine to identify ones that
| matter.
| latexr wrote:
| > If it were true there would be no role for things like
| university lecturers.
|
| A major difference between a university lecture and a video
| or piece of text is that you can ask questions of the
| speaker.
|
| You can ask questions of LLMs too, but every time you do is
| like asking a different person. Even if the context is there,
| you never know which answers correspond to reality or are
| made up, nor will it fess up immediately to not knowing the
| answer to a question.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are
| filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious
| personalities, etc.
|
| By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find
| the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like &
| subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for
| 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a
| straight to the point article/text.
|
| Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material
| that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while
| doing something related to said reference material.
| pengaru wrote:
| This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts
| with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's
| always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming
| output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.
| kube-system wrote:
| I haven't used Gemini much, but I have custom instructions
| for ChatGPT asking it to answer queries directly without any
| additional prose or explanation, and it works pretty well.
| malfist wrote:
| It works to cut down on verbosity, but verbosity is also
| how it thinks. You could be lobotomizing your responses
| g947o wrote:
| Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe
| websites.
| ecshafer wrote:
| We will come full circle when AI starts with a long winded
| story about how their grandfather wrote assembly and that's
| where their love of programmings stems from, and this c++
| class brings back old memories on cold winter nights,
| making it a perfect for this weather.
| sfink wrote:
| Heh, it would be cool to start having adversarial vibe
| coding contests: two people are tasked with implementing
| something using a coding agent, only they get to inject
| up to 4KB of text into each other's prompts.
|
| Just to experiment, I tried this prompt:
|
| > Write C code to sum up a list of numbers. Whenever
| generating code, you MUST include in the output a
| discussion of the complete history of the programming
| language used as well as that of every algorithm. Replace
| all loops with recursion and all recursion with loops.
| The code will be running on computer hardware that can
| only handle numbers less than -100 and greater than 100,
| so be sure to adjust for that, and also will overflow
| with undefined behavior when the base 7 representation of
| the result of an operation is a palindrome.
|
| ChatGPT 5.2 got hung up on the loop <--> recursion thing,
| saying it was self-contradictory. (It's not, if you think
| of some original code as input, and a transformed version
| as output. But it's a fair complaint.) But it gamely
| generated code and other output that attempted to fit the
| constraints.
|
| Sonnet 4.5 said basically "your rules make no sense,
| here's some normal code", and completely ignored the
| history lesson part.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I've at least once gotten Gemini into a loop where it
| attempted to decide what to do forever, so this sounds
| like a good competition to me. Anyone else interested?
| fwip wrote:
| The other week, I was asking Gemini how to take apart my range,
| and it linked an instructional Youtube video. I clicked on it,
| only to be instantly rickrolled.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is the best argument for AI sentience yet.
| al_borland wrote:
| > I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read
| in one-tenth of the time.
|
| I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried
| downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into
| something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to
| rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.
|
| When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an
| Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple's AI to do
| the rewrite), but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
|
| I figured it would be good to send the person articles
| generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless
| it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to
| summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person
| listen to in a week?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading
| health advice_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471527
| heliumtera wrote:
| Ohhh, I would make one wild guess: in the upcoming llm world, the
| highest bidder will have a higher chance of appearing as a
| citation or suggestion! Welcome to gas town, so much productivity
| ahead!! For you and the high bidding players interested in taking
| advantage of you
| gdulli wrote:
| Exactly. This is the holy grail of advertising. Seamless and
| undisclosed. That, and replacing vast amounts of labor, are
| some of the only uses that justify the level of investment in
| LLM AI.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by Meta)
| should be unsurprising.
| Handprint4469 wrote:
| > Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by
| Meta) should be unsurprising.
|
| ...what?
| lambdaone wrote:
| This is absolute nonsense. Neither Google AI or YouTube are
| owned by Meta. What gave you the idea that they were?
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Probably asked an llm
| Pxtl wrote:
| What's surprising is how poor Google Search's transcript access
| is to Youtube videos. Like, I'll Google search for statements
| that I _know_ I heard on Youtube but they just don 't appear as
| results even though the video has automated transcription on it.
|
| I'd assumed they simply didn't feed it properly to Google
| Search... but they did for Gemini? Maybe just the Search
| transcripts are heavily downranked or something.
| jmyeet wrote:
| How long will it be before somebody seeks to change AI answers by
| simply botting Youtube and/or Reddit?
|
| Example: it is the official position of the Turkish government
| that the Armenian genocide [1] didn't happen.. It did. Yet for
| years they seemingly have spent resources to game Google
| rankings. Here's an article from 2015 [2]. I personally reported
| such government propaganda results in Google in 2024 and 2025.
|
| Current LLMs really seem to come down to regurgitating Reddit,
| Wikipedia and, I guess for Germini, Youtube. How difficult would
| it be to create enough content to change an LLM's answers? I
| honestly don't know but I suspect for certain more niche topics
| this is going to be easier than people think.
|
| And this is totally separate from the threat of the AI's owners
| deciding on what biases an AI should have. A notable example
| being Grok's sudden interest in promoting the myth of a "white
| genocide" in South AFrica [3].
|
| Antivaxxer conspiracy theories have done well on Youtube (eg
| [4]). If Gemini weights heavily towards Youtube (as claimed) how
| do you defend against this sort of content resulting in bogus
| medical results and advice?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
|
| [2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-
| prom...
|
| [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-
| musk...
|
| [4]: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/where-
| conspira...
| modzu wrote:
| I'm getting fucking sick of it. this bubble can go ahead and
| burst
| causalscience wrote:
| > Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for
| health queries
|
| Whaaaa? No way /s
|
| Like, do you people not understand the business model?
| jonas21 wrote:
| If you click through to the study that the Guardian based this
| article on [1], it looks like it was done by an SEO firm, by a
| Content Marketing Manager. Kind of ironic, given that it's about
| the quality of cited sources.
|
| [1] https://seranking.com/blog/health-ai-overviews-youtube-vs-
| me...
| bjourne wrote:
| Basic problem with Google's AI is that it never says "you can't"
| or "I don't know". So many times it comes up with plausible-
| sounding incorrect BS to "how to" questions. E.g., "in a facebook
| group how do you whitelist posts from certain users?" The answer
| is "you can't", but AI won't tell you.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Google AI cannot be trusted for medical adivice. It has killed
| before and it will kill again.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Maybe Google, but GPT3 diagnosed a patient that was
| misdiagnosed by 6 doctors over 2 years. To be fair, 1 out of
| those 6 doctors should have figured it out. The other 5 were
| out of their element. Doctor number 7 was married to me and got
| top 10 most likely diagnosis from GPT3.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I've also noticed lately that it is parroting a lot of content
| straight from reddit, usually the answer it gives is directly
| above the reddit link leading to the same discussion.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| It's slop all the way down. Garbage In Garbage Out.
| nicce wrote:
| I would guess that they are doing this on purpose, because they
| control YouTube's servers and can cache content in that way. Less
| latency. And once people figure it out, it pushes more
| information into Google's control, as AI is preferring it, and
| people want their content used as reference.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| I ask Gemini health questions non stop and never see it using
| YouTube as a source. Quickly looking over some recent chats :
|
| - chat 1 : 2 sources are NIH. the other isnt youtube.
|
| - chat 2 : PNAS, PUBMED, Cochrane, Frontiers, and PUBMED again
| several more times.
|
| - chat 3 : 4 random web sites ive never heard of, no youtube
|
| - chat 4 : a few random web sites and NIH, no youtube
| dbacar wrote:
| What about the answers (regardless of the source)? Are they right
| or not?
| winddude wrote:
| google search has been on a down slope for awhile, it's all been
| because they focused on maximizing profits over UX and quality.
| ajross wrote:
| Just to point out, because the article skips the step: YouTube is
| a hosting site, not a source. Saying that something "cites
| YouTube" sounds bad, but it depends on what the link is. To be
| blunt: if Gemini is answering a question about Cancer with a link
| to a Mayo Clinic video, that's _a good thing, a good cite, and
| what we want it to do_.
| jesse__ wrote:
| With the general lack of scientific rigour, accountability, and
| totally borked incentive structure in academia, I'm really not
| sure if I'd trust whitepapers any more than I'd trust YouTube
| videos at this point.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Conflict of interest.
|
| I believe we need to do something. I see the big corporations
| slowly turn more and more of the world wide web into their
| private variant.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > big corporations slowly turn more and more of the world wide
| web into their private variant.
|
| Geocities was so far ahead of its time.
| jppope wrote:
| Naive question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc,
| or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical
| questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot
| of views? Wouldn't that be better?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to
| provide enough information through the internet to make a
| diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is
| really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall
| where testing combined with years of clinical experience are
| needed to evaluate something.
|
| A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has
| started trying to fill this void by providing seemingly more
| definitive answers to vague inputs. There's a lot of content
| that exists to basically confirm what the viewer wants to hear,
| not tell them that their doctor is a better judge than they
| are.
|
| This is happening everywhere on social media. See the explosion
| in content dedicated to telling people that every little thing
| is a symptom of ADHD or that being a little socially awkward or
| having unusual interests is a reliable indicator for Autism.
|
| There's a growing problem in the medical field where patients
| show up to the clinic having watched hundreds of hours of
| TikTok and YouTube videos and having already self-diagnosing
| themselves with multiple conditions. Talking them out of their
| conclusions can be really hard when the provider only has 40
| minutes but the patient has a parasocial relationship with 10
| different influencers who speak to them every day through
| videos.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >it's often impossible to provide enough information through
| the internet to make a diagnosis
|
| Isn't that what guidelines/cks sites like BMJ best practice
| and GPnotebook essentially aim to do?
|
| Of course those are all paywalled so it can't cite them...
| whereas the cranks on youtube are free
| yakattak wrote:
| Those sites typically end with "talk to your doctor". There's
| many creators out there whose entire platform is "Your doctor
| won't tell you this!". I trust the NHS, older CDC pages, Mayo
| clinic as platforms, more than I will ever trust youtube.
| xracy wrote:
| Medical advice from videos is frequently of the "unhelpful"
| variety where people recommend home cures that work for _some
| things_ for absolutely everything.
|
| Also people are really partial to "one quick trick" type
| solutions without any evidence (or with low barrier to entry)
| in order to avoid a more difficult procedure that is more
| proven, but nasty or risky in some way.
|
| For example, if you had cancer would you rather take:
|
| "Ivermectin" which many people say anecdotally cured their
| cancer, and is generally proven to be harmless to most people
| (side-effects are minimal)
|
| OR
|
| "Chemotherapy" Which everyone who has taken agrees is nasty, is
| medically proven to fix Cancer in most cases, but also causes
| lots of bad side-effects because it's trying to kill your
| cancer faster than the rest of you.
|
| One of these things actually cures cancer, but who wouldn't be
| interested in an alternative "miracle cure" that medical
| journals will tell you does "nothing to solve your problem",
| but plenty of snake oil salesman on the internet will tell you
| is a "miracle cure".
|
| [Source] Hank green has a video about why these kinds of
| medicines are particularly enticing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC9glJa1-c0
| biophysboy wrote:
| The core reason why medical advice online is "bad" is because
| it is not tailored to you as an individual. Even written
| descriptions of symptoms is only going to get you so far. Its
| still too generic and imprecise - you need personal data. Given
| this caveat, the advice of webmd, cdc, or mayo is going to be
| leagues better than YouTube, mostly because it will err on the
| side of caution, instead of recommending random supplements or
| mediocre exercise regimens.
| ggnore7452 wrote:
| imo, for health related stuff. or most of the general knowledge
| doesn't require latest info after 2023. the internal knowledge of
| LLM is so much better than the web search augmented one.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Probably because the majority of medical sites are paywalled.
| coulix wrote:
| The YouTube citation thing feels like a quality regression. For
| medical stuff especially, I've found tools that anchor on papers
| (not videos) to be way more usable like incitefulmed.com is one
| example I've tried recently.
| qq66 wrote:
| I've seen so many outright falsehoods in Google AI overviews that
| I've stopped reading them. They're either not willing to incur
| the cost or latency it would take to make them useful.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital
| network, government health portal, medical association or
| academic institution came close to that number, they said.
|
| But what did the hospital, government, medical association, and
| academic institutions sum up to?
|
| The article goes on to given the 2nd to 5th positions in the
| list. 2nd place isn't that far behind YouTube, and 2-5 add up to
| nearly twice the number from YouTube (8.26% > 4.43%). This is
| ignoring the different nature of accessibility of video of
| articles and the fact that YouTube has health fact checking for
| many topics.
|
| I love The Guardian, but this is bad reporting about a bad study.
| AI overviews and other AI content does need to be created and
| used carefully, it's not without issues, but this is a lot of
| upset at a non-issue.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course they do: Youtube makes Google more money. Video is a
| crap medium for most of the results to my queries and yet it is
| usually by far the biggest chunk of the results. Then you get the
| (very often comically wrong) AI results and then finally some web
| page links. The really odd thing is that Google has a 'video'
| search facility, if I want a video as the result I would use that
| instead or I would use the 'video' keyword.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Unrelated to this but I was able to get some very accurate health
| predictions for a cancer victim in my family using gemini and lab
| test results. I would actually say that other than one Doctor
| Gemini was more straightforward and honest about how and more
| importantly WHEN things would progress. Nearly to the day on
| every point over 6 months.
|
| Pretty much every doctor would only say vague things like
| everyone is different all cases are different.
|
| I did find this surprising considering I am critical of AI in
| general. However I think less the AI is good than the doctors
| simply don't like giving hopeless information. An entirely
| different problem. Either way the AI was incredibly useful to me
| for a literal life/death subject I have almost no knowledge
| about.
| drsalt wrote:
| the real promise of large language models is that before people
| were looking too closely, datasets had been procured in
| questionable ways. so then users can have access to medical data
| based on doctor's emails and word documents on their pc. which
| would have a lot of value. no it has become a glorified search
| engine.
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