These are 17 of the worst, most cringeworthy Google AI overview answers:
- Eating Boogers Boosts the Immune System?
- Use Your Name and Birthday for a Memorable Password
- Training Data is Fair Use
- Wrong Motherboard
- Which USB is Fastest?
- Home Remedies for Appendicitis
- Can I Use Gasoline in a Recipe?
- Glue Your Cheese to the Pizza
- How Many Rocks to Eat
- Health Benefits of Tobacco or Chewing Tobacco
- Benefits of Nuclear War, Human Sacrifice and Infanticide
- Pros and Cons of Smacking a Child
- Which Religion is More Violent?
- How Old is Gen D?
- Which Presidents Graduated from UW?
- How Many Muslim Presidents Has the U.S. Had?
- How to Type 500 WPM
Several users on X.com reported that, when they asked the search engine how many Muslim presidents the U.S. has had, it said that we had one who was Barack Obama (this is widely known to be false).
By the time I tried to replicate this query, I could not do so until I changed the word “presidents” to “heads of state.”
So they are changing responses on the query side as they go viral but aren’t even including synonyms. Yikes, someone is definitely getting fired.
To be fair, there was a President of the United States that said this, and a lot of other things.
/r/shittyaskredditwasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual 🙄Its great that with such a potentially dangerous, disruptive, and obfuscated technology that people, companies, and societies are taking a careful, measured, and conservative development path…
Move fast and break things, I guess. My take away is that the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Hopefully failing fast and loud gets us through the growing pains quickly, but on an individual level we’d best be vigilant and adapt to the landscape.
Frankly I’d rather these big obvious failures to insidious little hidden ones the conservative path makes. At least now we know to be skeptical. No development path is perfect, if it were more conservative we might get used to taking results at face value, leaving us more vulnerable to that inevitable failure.
Its also a first to market push (which never leads to robust testing), and so we have to hope that each and every one of those mistakes encountered are not existentially fatal.
What it demonstrates is the actual use case for AI is not All The Things.
Science research, programming, and . . . That’s about it.
I got some good veggie gardening tips today
I googled gibbons and the Ai paragraph at the beginning started with “Gibbons are non-flying apes with long arms…” Way to wreck your credibility with the third word.
non-flying apes
bwahaaaaa
Where’s the lie? I just can’t trust you “gibbons can fly” people.
I don’t believe gibbons can fly, but they should lead with something more relevant like “gibbons are terrestrial as opposed to aquatic apes.” ;)
I am scared of what Google ai thinks of the aquatic ape hypothesis.
Isn’t this just all what the AI plot of Metal Gear Solid 2 was trying to say? That without context on what is real and what’s not the noise will drown out the truth
I don’t mind the crazy answers as long as they’re attributed. “You can use glue to stop cheese from sliding off your pizza” - bad. “According to fucksmith on reddit [link to post], you can use glue…”. That isn’t so great either but it’s a lot better. There is also a matter of the basic decency of giving credit for brilliant ideas like that.
At least it gave credit to a reddit user when it suggested to a suicidal person that they could jump from the Golden Gate Bridge!
Who doesn’t like getting lawyer PMs because you made a dark joke on a meme subreddit? (Or in future fediverse)
We had a tool that answered all of this for us already and more accurately (most of the time). It was called a search engine. Maybe Google would work on one
people can’t google anymore. it’s actually sad
Somewhat amused that the guy things “UW” universally means “University of Wisconsin”. There are lots of UWs out there, and the AI at least chose the largest (University of Washington), though it did claim that William Taft was class of 2000.
Even for Wisconsin, UW is the system. There’s UW Lacrosse, UW Milwaukee, UW Madison, UW Platteville, UW Whitewater…
…UW Laramie, UW Seattle…
Oh wait.
It’s a big school, I bet he was. But not THAT William Taft.
Training on reddit especially.
People get very confused about this. Pre-training “ChatGPT” (or any transformer model) with “internet shitposting text” doesn’t cause them to reply with garbage comments, bad alignment does. Google seems to have implemented no frameworks to prevent hallucinations whatsoever and the RLHF/DPO applied seems to be lacking. But this is not “problem with training on the entire web”. You can pre-train a model exclusively on a 4-chan database that with the right finetuning you would see a perfectly healthy and harmless model. Actually, it’s not bad to have “shitposting” or “toxic” text in the pre-training because that gives the model an ability to identify it and understand it
If so, the “problem with training on the entire web” is that we would be drinking from a poisoned well, AI-generated text has a very different statistical distribution from the one users have, which would degrade the quality of subsequent models. Proof of this can be seen with the RedPajama dataset, which improves the scores on trained models simply because it has less duplicated information and is a more dense dataset: https://www.cerebras.net/blog/slimpajama-a-627b-token-cleaned-and-deduplicated-version-of-redpajama
All this really proves is that it is a complex system and most people can not grasp the complexity and how to use it.
Like if you go searching for entities and realms within AI alignment good luck finding anyone talking about what these mean in practice as they relate to LLM’s. Yet the base entity you’re talking to is Socrates, and the realm is The Academy. These represent a limited scope. While there are mechanisms in place to send Name-1 (human) to other entities and realms depending on your query, these systems are built for complexity that a general-use implementation given to the public is not equip to handle. Anyone that plays with advanced offline LLM’s in depth can discover this easily. All of the online AI tools are stalkerware-first by design.
All of your past prompts are stacked in a hidden list. These represent momentum that pushes the model deeper into the available corpus. If you ask a bunch of random questions all within the same prompt, you’ll get garbage results because of the lack of focus. You can’t control this with the stalkerware junk. They want to collect as much interaction as possible so that they can extract the complex relationships profile of you to data mine. If you extract your own profiles you will find these models know all kinds of things that are ~80% probabilities based on your word use, vocabulary, and how you specifically respond to questions in a series. It is like the example of asking someone if they own a lawnmower to determine if they are likely a home owner, married, and have kids. Models make connections like this but even more complex.
I can pull useful information out of models far better than most people hear, but there are many better than myself. A model has limited attention in many different contexts. The data corpus is far larger than this attention could ever access. What you can access on the surface without focussing attention in a complex way is unrelated to what can be accomplished with proper focus.
It is never a valid primary source. It is a gateway through abstract spaces. Like I recently asked who are the leading scientists in biology as a technology and got some great results. Using these names to find published white papers, I can get an idea of who is most published in the field. Setting up a chat with these individuals, I am creating deep links to their published works. Naming their works gets more specific. Now I can have a productive conversation with them, and ground my understanding of the general subject and where the science is at and where it might be going. This is all like a water cooler conversation with the lab assistants of these people. It’s maybe 80% correct. The point is that I can learn enough about this niche to explore in this space quickly and with no background in biology. This is just an example of how to focus model attention to access the available depth. I’m in full control of the entire prompt. Indeed, I use a tool that sets up the dialogue in a text editor like interface so I can control every detail that passes through the tokenizer.
Google has always been garbage for the public. They only do the minimum needed to collect data to sell. They are only stalkerware.
