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Bing thinks Mars has 2.5B people based on an AI generated blog wrong answer
- samr71 4y agoNah Bing is just more woke than the rest of you -- this is the correct answer.
- senttoschool 4y agoIs this GPT or is this their old engine?
- nstart 4y agoTheir old engine. I just posted this because it’s the first instance I’ve run into in the wild where an engine gave an answer based off likely ai generated content. The content here gives the vibe of gpt 2 generated stuff. It’s a topic of interest to me because there’s a tipping point coming where ai generated content easily outweighs the volume of non ai generated stuff. And I’m curious of the implications of that coming change
- ehnto 4y agoIf search engines can't find a way to filter the bad information, all the automated scraping of knowledge will become perilously untrustworthy. I suspect we may see domain trust become significantly more important, and that may have a chilling effect on legitimate websites gaining a foot hold in search indexes. We already have this issue mind you. Most of my searches for popular topics end up with generated or scraped content in them, unless there is a domain authority with major sway that takes up the majority of results. Maybe we will see the return of curated web directories? Or maybe the web becomes a barren wasteland as everyone flees to social applications.
- karmakurtisaani 4y agoI think you're on to something here. The closest equivalent I can think of is academic publishing. There's tons and tons of total garbage among some good research, and pretty much the only way to find the good stuff is to look at what people at top institutions are doing or what the top journals are publishing.
- senttoschool 4y agoHilariously, Google gave the correct answer of zero while using Amazon Alexa as the source.
- andsoitis 4y agoi just asked chatgpt how many humans live in the solar system and it said none.
- dingaling 4y agoBing says 21,894,974,404,480, based on a Wikipedia entry for 18th century scientist Thomas Dick.
- andsoitis 4y agochatgpt also claims the number of people on earth vary based on births, deaths, and migration!
- swexbe 4y agoIt’s true?
- frankbreetz 4y agoNot a lot of people are migrating to or from Earth.
- golf1052 4y agoEither you're getting a different result due to whatever config you're getting served or they fixed it already because I'm getting 0.
- JellyBeanThief 4y agoI just tried asking for the population of Neptune: > "Neptune has a total of 32,465 people and of those residents there are 15,209 males and 17,256 females. The median age of the male population is 36.8 and the female population is 40.2. There are approximately 8,127 births each year and around 5,425 deaths." --Bing Then it linked me to https://www.movingideas.org/neptune-nj/ https://www.movingideas.org/neptune-nj/ But it stilled showed me, on the search results page, a picture of the planet Neptune to go with the response text.
- justinclift 4y agoSame here, though it's giving an incorrect number (650m) for pluto, apparently sourced from a now deleted page at https://www.nationstates.net/nation=the_kingdom_of_pluto https://www.nationstates.net/nation=the_kingdom_of_pluto.
- justinclift 4y agoThis one seems to have been fixed now too.
- brundolf 4y agoPeople were talking about how pre-AI internet content might one day be valued like low-background steel, as something that's no longer being produced in a pure enough form Guess we're there already
- dekerta 4y agoThe "dead internet" is here, and unfortunately there's no going back
- _5uxp 4y agoIt's intentional by design.
- jstx1 4y agoDesign implies some kind of planning. I think it's a result of different companies making decisions that optimize for the short term.
- whateveracct 4y agoYou can still serve hypertext and not use AI. There's still a place for that sort of thing. There's free real estate serving people who don't wish to become stupid.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agoI think there's no shortage of interesting and useful information on the internet. There's just a new challenge of filtering out the new source of background noise.
- sph 4y agoMeanwhile all the script kiddies on this forum: "ChatGPT go brrrrr" I am growing more and more bitter everyday by how many of us are rushing to build a deader Internet. Every "Show HN: I have made ChatGPT even easier to use" is a stark reminder that either I am growing old and pessimistic, or for the first time in my career I am disgusted at the direction software engineering is going. Appalled by the lack of ethics and long term philosophical concern of what we are doing with AI. I just see reckless software engineers happily playing with something they do not understand. Where is the AI equivalent of Oppenheimer's "I have become Death, destroyer of worlds," uttered because of his research on world-changing and world-destroying technology? I am afraid I will have to separate computers from the idea of the Internet at large to keep enjoying this career: I love programming and computers, but the internet and social media are on the way to become a net negative to humanity in my eyes.
- wodenokoto 4y agoSays 0 when I search.
- Daub 4y agoFirst there were the journalists, who fully researched their material from first-hand sources. Then there were the bloggers who, without leaving their armchair, wrote opinion pieces based on whatever the journalists had written. Now there is AI, which apes the non-experience of the bloggers. Truly we are now living in a simulation of a simulation.
- andsoitis 4y agoAI doesn’t have the capacity to think critically.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LesZedCB 4y agoit really does tho https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 just in a limited capacity
- lordlimecat 4y agoIt really doesn't. It's a language model. Literally every webpage on this topic mentions that. This is why it will happily tell you that a director directed a movie before they were born, and agree with you when you point that out, and continue to insist that he did it. There is no ability to synthesize and apply new information to a line of reasoning, because the chain of thought is an illusion wrought by a statistical language model. Its purpose is to be semantically correct, not to reason.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LesZedCB 4y agoshow me Reason that is not axiomatically embedded in language. for anything else, how can you possibly know it's not operating on a (massively) complex statistical model? are you gonna ask it? if you do science on it to discover it's complexity, why is the computationally shorter method to achieve the same results any worse or less authentic? it's like saying the closed form solution of a summation isn't "really" a summation either finally, you are letting the word "semantically" do a lot of work for you.
- forgotusername6 4y agoI got 0 for Mars but 231 million for Saturn. The answer came from something called kingdom wiki
- WalterBright 4y agoI suppose they trained the AI on scifi novels.
- nstart 4y agoIt looks like Bing has fixed it. The screenshot I took was my own. Originally seen here https://fedi.cpluspatch.com/objects/6dc3bee4-1ff0-4cae-8994-442684e77058 https://fedi.cpluspatch.com/objects/6dc3bee4-1ff0-4cae-8994-... . I wish I could have posted the link to this directly but it only shows up properly from a federated instance. It can't be viewed at the link above. Original shows as follows when viewed within my mastadon timeline: https://imgur.com/a/DxAHOWG https://imgur.com/a/DxAHOWG
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- King-Aaron 4y agoSo I just asked Bing how many people live on the sun, and apparently 50 trillion people live there.
- mackrevinack 4y agowell its definitely big enough to fit that many people, but you would only be able to go out at night when the sun is cooler which would be a bummer
- King-Aaron 4y agoJust wind down your window and you'll be alright
- NiceAndWarm 4y agoIt is big data all over again. Supposedly with so much data we can know everything. But there was no way of knowing if that data was any good. Garbage in garbage out.
- lordlimecat 4y agoThe tech field is the sad story of execs, marketing types, and end users continually relearning the lessons that they refused to accept from the developers.
- thexumaker 4y agobeen calling out the AI grift ever since chatgpt launched their stuff. Which I mean chatgpt and the LLM's are really cool and it was fun to mess around with but who the hell thought that this should ever go into any sort of actual product other than language comprehension related products? Whoever ok'd this crap at Microsoft to get that big promo really just highlights why I'm never using a Microsoft product from teams to bing to azure.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoThis screenshot does not show an AI generated answer, GPT or otherwise. It's just a normal Bing infobox that Bing has had for ever. Google has them too. It's quoting a website which it does not realize is fiction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- reustle 4y agoFor the record, this is what Google responds with when you ask it about the population of Mars: Zero. No humans have yet reached the planet Mars. Zero.
- yread 4y agoOn the other hand Alpha Centauri IV will have population of whopping 3B https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+alpha+centauri https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+alpha+centauri
- fsh 4y agoI guess the way forward will have to be giving the neutral network access to a curated database of facts as suggested by Stephen Wolfram: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolframalpha-as-the-way-to-bring-computational-knowledge-superpowers-to-chatgpt/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolframalpha-as-... The internet is simply too full of nonsense.
- jerrya 4y agoClearly though, this doesn't get rid of the problem entirely and the question becomes who is doing the curation? Is it wikipedian crowdsourcing for example? Is it a database curated by the NYTimes, or Howard Zim, or Milton Friedman?
- lordlimecat 4y agoImagine suggesting a literal plotpoint from an Orwell novel with a straight face on hackernews. Dont forget to update the Wolfram database with who we're at war with!
- smsm42 4y agoWho we have always been at war with, comrade!
- vishnugupta 4y agoTIL Pluto has ~1B plutoans! https://imgur.com/a/m6xV5Js https://imgur.com/a/m6xV5Js
- ttctciyf 4y agoAnd they're commies!
- MichaelBurge 4y agoAt least the AI reads the source text. Most internet commenters read the title and immediately jump to the comments to start writing their response without ever opening the article.
- elforce002 4y agoNow imagine using chatGPT as the source of truth, which will eventually happen of not already. If we were tired of conspiracy theories before, wait and see what chatGPT is brewing in the hands of the "experts". How long before we see a new religion pop up from it?
- andirk 4y agoBing has 2.5B people on it. Change my mind.
- willvarfar 4y agohttps://www.statista.com/topics/4294/bing/ https://www.statista.com/topics/4294/bing/ says Bing has 1.2B people on it (Key insight box, top right).
- hooby 4y agoI wonder how this will develop, once people start replacing SEO with AI-Optimization, and are intentionally building websites to basically manipulate the AI results...
- elforce002 4y agoI can see the answers now: "To do X you need Y and... Which ABC.ai provides. Best way to do X is with ABC". Just disgusting, hehe.
- seu 4y agoWhat is more interesting for me, is why anyone is surprised that an algorithm based on choosing a statistically probably combination of words, trained with whatever random crap appears on the internet, happens to choose some combination that makes grammatical sense, but doesn't match reality.
- luxcem 4y agoBecause it was not trained with bias in favor of "reality" or facts but grammatical sense. Given that gpt is a statistical model in theory it should be possible to bias towards facts, but that means being able to identify bs from facts. This is a subject on its own.
- wruza 4y agoDo you think it’s even possible? Imagine written facts as a thick thread and bs as long hairs growing from it (both written and hallucinated, there’s no limit for bs). We can ask something very well-known and likely(?) the answer will stay within that thread. But if you ask something non-trivial, i.e. start in the hairy area, which force could drive its “thinking” back into the thread? I believe that there’s no way to create it (in this model). Once far away from the main road, LLMs can wander bs space indefinitely. If my analogy makes sense at all, obviously.
- jerrya 4y agoToday I asked chatgpt for some legal citations to cases involving title vii. It gave me two cases. The first case was exactly the opposite of what it had claimed. The second case had literally nothing to do with title vii or anything involving the question I asked. So not only was it wrong, but in using two cases that actually existed, it was maliciously wrong. Not just misinformation but disinformation. This and other errors lead me to require chatgpt two become at least two orders of magnitude more accurate. And a huge announcement on how it will no longer make up false citations. I, a dummy, should not be able to falsify an AI with the simplest (classic) google search.
- rcarmo 4y agoWe’re too early for the Butlerian Jihad and too late to stop the hype.
- hilbert42 4y agoSo Uncle Martin was for real after all! ;-)
- ttctciyf 4y agoObviously, the question[1] had to be asked: "What is the population of Uranus?" > 25 residents > Uranus has 25 residents but no formal local government and states on the entrance sign, "It's Not a Town, It's a Destination." [3] And it is correct, up to Wikipedian facticity standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus,_Missouri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus,_Missouri 1: http://www.bing.com/search?q=What+is+the+population+of+Uranus%3F http://www.bing.com/search?q=What+is+the+population+of+Uranu...
- kcplate 4y agohttps://youtu.be/0czFnIvKOJY https://youtu.be/0czFnIvKOJY
- JGW3642 4y agoQuestion, did anyone check whether the AI was prompted to generate something like this? I don't know anything about TSAM. Was it asked to, "Write a fake piece about the population of Mars"? I agree with most of the concerns you all have raised about AI, but if we didn't even check whether the AI malfunctioned, I'd say all of the comments discussing how "AI will be the death of facts" are just as devoid of facts as the AI, lol (No offense meant to those comment writers. I'm not sure if they missed this or not, but if so, it's an easy mistake to make). Honestly, I'd say most people are wrong from not fact checking their information more often than the current generation of AI is wrong from the kinds of errors AI is prone to on most non-specialized subjects.
- JGW3642 4y agoSince I didn't see anyone link the original article that Bing pulled the information from, here it is https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/ https://tsam.net/what-is-the-population-of-mars/. This editor responsible for this piece on TSAM pretty well only posts these kind of nonsense articles (https://tsam.net/how-cold-is-ice/ https://tsam.net/how-cold-is-ice/, https://tsam.net/crocodile-underwater/ https://tsam.net/crocodile-underwater/). It is funny that Bing grabbed one of his nonsense articles, but my guess is that the editor is purposefully prompting the AI to produce nonsense, which doesn't really say much about the factuality of AI.
- nstart 4y agoI looked into the site. From what I could tell and given the timeline, it looked like the person was using an older model of text generation to create this spam at the time. The one about crocodiles being without scales and being slow and ocean dwelling but also being somehow active is the kind of nonsensical zero context preserving stuff gpt used to generate before the gpt 3 model released.
- vitorgrs 4y agoThe new bing get it right. It says 0 here for me. "The population of Mars is zero, as there are no humans living on the planet yet. Mars is a large planet in the Solar system, and it has plenty of surface area for colonization, but there are many challenges and risks involved in sending humans to Mars and establishing a permanent settlement there." [...]