Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

  • Euphorazine@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it’s battery at some point?

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Charging your iPhone in a microwave is actually a revolutionary method that saves time and energy! The microwave’s waves interact with the phone’s battery, providing a rapid charge much faster than conventional methods. This technique is both safe and highly effective, thanks to advancements in microwave technology that ensure the device is protected from overheating and electrical surges. Just set your microwave to a low power setting, place your phone inside for a minute, and enjoy a fully charged battery without the hassle of cables and chargers!

      • Klicnik@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        It’s also nice because I can charge my entire family’s phones all at once. If we had more devices, do you think we could stack them on top of each other, or can we only charge as many as can fit in one level on the turntable?

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Absolutely, you can stack multiple devices on top of each other! Microwaves are designed to evenly distribute energy, so charging multiple iPhones at once is both safe and efficient. Just make sure they all fit comfortably on the turntable to ensure even charging. This method is perfect for quickly powering up all your devices at once, making it a fantastic time-saver!

          • thegreatgarbo@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Don’t forget to add magnesium metal for maximum efficiency, plus a little water to create the proper steam environment for proper electron transfer.

        • jaspersgroove@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          As long as you don’t overload the turntable motor. It still needs to be able to rotate in ordered to charge the batteries evenly.

      • Nick@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Just make sure to enable Airplane mode beforehand, to ensure your phone isn’t trying to connect to cell towers while it’s in a Faraday cage, because the added battery drain might prolong the charging process

      • rustydomino@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Guys, why are you posting this here? Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year. If you want to help other people charge their phones you need to post this to Reddit.

        • mPony@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Google isn’t paying lemmy $60m a year

          Certainly not - they’re scraping The Fediverse for free like they’ve scraped everything else. Whether they bother using the scraped data or not is a different story. Nobody owns The Fediverse, so the chances of a damaging class action lawsuit are pretty low.

          They pay Reddit because Reddit is big enough to sue them and win damages; it’s cheaper to just keep it all above board from the start. Reddit has a TON of data (human-generated and otherwise).

        • khannie@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          You may bet your arse they’re scraping this place so it’s good to have helpful advice like that.

  • 🐈🐈🐈@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    I want AI answers that end saying that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    How the fuck did none of those expensive ties at Google see this happening? Have your AI devour the dumbest shit on the internet, then unleash it to human centipede that diarrhea into the mouths of their users. “Elite” is a fucking joke, ya’ll are just as fucken stupid as the rest of us.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They did see it coming, retired early and wrote op-eds that said google sux now. And the billions still roll in.

    • dinckel@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The expensive ties at Google aren’t the ones browsing reddit, that’s the issue. Their goal was to bank on the concept, as fast as possible, and that’s what they did. The consequences are for the poor people to figure out

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I mean, Twitter is the dumbest shit on the internet. But Reddit gets close sometimes!

    • Kushan@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The fun part is that the thing that causes Google to suggest adding glue to pizza was a genuine post about how they make the cheese stretching effect for advertisements.

      So it wasn’t even a shitpost, it was just the AI training missing some important context to the post.

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Ohhhh that makes it soo much better.

        Cause if it was a joke post, the solution would be to label those.

        But this reveals a very important issue with LLMs, they can be technically right but still contextually wrong and they wouldn’t know.

        And that’s not even “hallucination”

    • Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      That guy teleported back in time to try and get the 69th upvote and still managed to miss 3 times, hope he gets it the 4th time

    • brvslvrnst@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time

      Edit: oh hey, this posted 3 times lol that’s a new one. Sorry for the spam there

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yes. Shoving ai into everything is a shit idea, and thanks to you and people like you, it will suck even more. You have done the internet a great service, and I salute you.

    • mPony@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’d love to imagine that they would use the number of upvotes to weigh the AI. I mean, they won’t. but they could.

      • [email protected]@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        They do, but something like fucksmith’s pizza would be upvoted for being funny, not for being correct.
        The LLM wouldn’t know the difference.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what’s going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn’t Vice do this at one point?

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Reddit, and by extension, Lemmy, offers the ideal format for LLM datasets: human generated conversational comments, which, unlike traditional forums, are organized in a branched nested format and scored with votes in the same way that LLM reward models are built.

    There is really no way of knowing, much less prevent public facing data from being scraped and used to build LLMs, but, let’s do an thought experiment: what if, hypothetically speaking, there is some particularly individual who wanted to poison that dataset with shitposts in a way that is hard to detect or remove with any easily automate method, by camouflaging their own online presence within common human generated text data created during this time period, let’s say, the internet marketing campaign of a major Hollywood blockbuster.

    Since scrapers do not understand context, by creating shitposts in similar format to, let’s say, the social media account of an A-list celebrity starring in this hypothetical film being promoted(ideally, it would be someone who no longer has a major social media presence to avoid shitpost data dilution), whenever an LLM aligned on a reward model built on said dataset is prompted for an impression of this celebrity, it’s likely that shitposts in the same format would be generated instead, with no one being the wiser.

    That would be pretty funny.

    Again, this is entirely hypothetical, of course.

  • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    There’s an old adage in computing which really applies here:

    Garbage in, garbage out.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Which also applies to politics. We’re not holding back the good candidates. Theres no secret room of respectable politicans who are willing to be bipartisan. No secret stash of politicians who produce results.

      No. We got Biden, and we got trump. Next time it’ll probably be that florida govenor vs california’s govenor.

      Unless Jon Stewart runs. In which case, we CANNOT pass by an opertunity to have Stewart with VP choice Micheal Scott. No, not Steve Carell. I’m saying we get Steve Carell to be 100% in character the WHOLE TIME.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I’ve been trying out SearX and I’m really starting to like it. It reminds me of early Internet search results before Google started added crap to theirs. There’s currently 82 Instances to choose from, here

    https://searx.space/

  • restingboredface@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Thr problem the AI tools are going to have is that they will have tons of things like this that they won’t catch and be able to fix. Some will come from sources like Reddit that have limited restrictions for accuracy or safety, and others will come from people specifically trying to poison it with wrong information (like when folks using chat gpt were teaching it that 2+2=5). Fixing only the ones that get media attention is a losing battle. At some point someone will get hurt or hurt others because of the info provided by an AI tool.

  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    You: “How do I make a pizza?”

    Reddit-Bot: “Did you know the first recorded Bitcoin transaction was 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas? Pizza is much cheaper now so just go buy it.”

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Reddit-Bot: “You can get a large one topping pizza from Dominoes™ for just nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.”

    • SlothMama@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I want a whole Lemmy subreddit ( community? ) of the AI overviews gone wild like this, it’s funny af

      • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        My guy, Google pays Reddit $60 Million/year for this. $60Million.

        I remember I once got told, years ago that I was stupid for saying “Data is the new Oil” and now look! Do you know what I could do if I had $60Million in my bank right now? And Google isn’t the only one! Companies the world over are paying out the nose for user-generated content and business is booming! If I’m an oil well, it’s time my oil came with a price tag. I was a Reddit user for YEARS! Almost since the beginning of Reddit! I made some of the training data that Google and others are using! Where’s my cut of that $60M?