Obviously you need hot glue for pizza, not the regular stuff.

Yes its totally ok to reuse fish tank tubing for grammy’s oxygen mask

How else are the toppings supposed to stay in place?

It’s like the difference between being given a grocery list from your mum and trying to remember what your mum usually sends you to the store for.

True, and it’s excellent at generating basic lists of things. But you need a human to actually direct it.

Having Google just generate whatever text is like just mashing the keys on a typewriter. You have tons of perfectly formed letters that mean nothing. They make no sense because a human isn’t guiding them.

I mean, it does learn, it just lacks reasoning, common sense or rationality.
What it learns is what words should come next, with a very complex a nuanced way if deciding that can very plausibly mimic the things that it lacks, since the best sequence of next-words is very often coincidentally reasoned, rational or demonstrating common sense. Sometimes it’s just lies that fit with the form of a good answer though.

I’ve seen some people work on using it the right way, and it actually makes sense. It’s good at understanding what people are saying, and what type of response would fit best. So you let it decide that, and give it the ability to direct people to the information they’re looking for, without actually trying to reason about anything. It doesn’t know what your monthly sales average is, but it does know that a chart of data from the sales system filtered to your user, specific product and time range is a good response in this situation.

The only issue for Google insisting on jamming it into the search results is that their entire product was already just providing pointers to the “right” data.

What they should have done was left the “information summary” stuff to their role as “quick fact” lookup and only let it look at Wikipedia and curated lists of trusted sources (mayo clinic, CDC, national Park service, etc), and then given it the ability to ask clarifying questions about searches, like “are you looking for product recalls, or recall as a product feature?” which would then disambiguate the query.

It really depends on the type of information that you are looking for. Anyone who understands how LLMs work, will understand when they’ll get a good overview.

I usually see the results as quick summaries from an untrusted source. Even if they aren’t exact, they can help me get perspective. Then I know what information to verify if something relevant was pointed out in the summary.

Today I searched something like “Are owls endangered?”. I knew I was about to get a great overview because it’s a simple question. After getting the summary, I just went into some pages and confirmed what the summary said. The summary helped me know what to look for even if I didn’t trust it.

It has improved my search experience… But I do understand that people would prefer if it was 100% accurate because it is a search engine. If you refuse to tolerate innacurate results or you feel your search experience is worse, you can just disable it. Nobody is forcing you to keep it.

Iirc cases where the central complaint is AI, ML, or other black box technology, the company in question was never held responsible because “We don’t know how it works”. The AI surge we’re seeing now is likely a consequence of those decisions and the crypto crash.

I’d love CVS try to push a lawsuit though.

We had a case in Canada where Air Canada was forced to give a customer a refund after its AI told him he was eligible for one, because the judge stated that Air Canada was responsible for what their AI said.

So, maybe?

I’ve seen some legal experts talk about how Google basically got away from misinformation lawsuits because they weren’t creating misinformation, they were giving you search results that contained misinformation, but that wasn’t their fault and they were making an effort to combat those kinds of search results. They were talking about how the outcome of those lawsuits might be different if Google’s AI is the one creating the misinformation, since that’s on them.

Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.

- J. Jonah Jameson

They’re going to fight tooth and nail to do the usual: remove any responsibility for what their AI says and does but do everything they can to keep the money any AI error generates.

Tough question. I doubt it though. I would guess they would have to prove mal intent in some form. When a person slanders someone they use a preformed bias to promote oneself while hurting another intentionally. While you can argue the learned data contained a bias, it promotes itself by being a constant source of information that users can draw from and therefore make money and it would in theory be hurting the company. Did the llm intentionally try to hurt the company would be the last bump. They all have holes. If I were a judge/jury and you gave me the decisions I would say it isn’t beyond a reasonable doubt.

Slander/libel nothing. It’s going to end up killing someone.

At the least it should have a prominent “for entertainment purposes only”, except it fails that purpose, too

If you’re a start up I guarantee it is

Big tech… I’ll put my chips in hell no

If you really believe Google is about to go out of business, you’re out of your mind

Making shit up IS a feature of LLMs. It’s crazy to use it as search engine. Now they’ll try to stop it from hallucinating to make it a better search engine and kill the one thing it’s good at …

Personally, that’s exactly what’s happening to me. I’ve seen enough that AI can’t be trusted to give a correct answer, so I don’t use it for anything important. It’s a novelty like Siri and Google Assistant were when they first came out (and honestly still are) where the best use for them is to get them to tell a joke or give you very narrow trivia information.

There must be a lot of people who are thinking the same. AI currently feels unhelpful and wrong, we’ll see if it just becomes another passing fad.

To be fair, you should fact check everything you read on the internet, no matter the source (though I admit that’s getting more difficult in this era of shitty search engines). AI can be a very powerful knowledge-acquiring tool if you take everything it tells you with a grain of salt, just like with everything else.

This is one of the reasons why I only use AI implementations that cite their sources (edit: not Google’s), cause you can just check the source it used and see for yourself how much is accurate, and how much is hallucinated bullshit. Hell, I’ve had AI cite an AI generated webpage as its source on far too many occasions.

Going back to what I said at the start, have you ever read an article or watched a video on a subject you’re knowledgeable about, just for fun to count the number of inaccuracies in the content? Real eye-opening shit. Even before the age of AI language models, misinformation was everywhere online.

I’m no defender of AI and it just blatantly making up fake stories is ridiculous. However, in the long term, as long as it does eventually get better, I don’t see this period of low to no trust lasting.

Remember how bad autocorrect was when it first rolled out? people would always be complaining about it and cracking jokes about how dumb it is. then it slowly got better and better and now for the most part, everyone just trusts their phones to fix any spelling mistakes they make, as long as it’s close enough.

This is definitely different from using Dall-E to make funny images. I’m on a thread in another forum that is (mostly) dedicated to AI images of Godzilla in silly situations and doing silly things. No one is going to take any advice from that thread apart from “making Godzilla do silly things is amusing and worth a try.”

Why people still use it is beyond me.

Like a decade ago?

What do you use now?

I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.