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Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage
- notjulianjaynes 3y agoYou can already choose the desired date range in ngram viewer. I can see how this is troubling, but I think it could also be, if not useful, at least interesting to compare ngram results pre and post GPT.
- andai 3y agoTangential but made me laugh: I used Google's Bard (now called Gemini) to search the web, and it returned total nonsense. It did provide sources though, so I checked it out. Turns out it was quoting from an AI generated page full of factual errors. Most amusing part was that I couldn't even find that page anywhere near the top of the regular Google search results. How did it even decide that was the right one?
- the_third_wave 3y ago> Most amusing part was that I couldn't even find that page anywhere near the top of the regular Google search results. How did it even decide that was the right one? Simple, it is biased towards its fellow LLM-comrades. It learned from its creators how to be biased towards a political ideology and now considers bias the new normal. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
- vitiral 3y agoThere's many things I don't know about AI, but I can almost guarantee very little about them is "simple"
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI think Gemini’s best feature is search inside my Google app data, for example “summarize the important stuff in the last three days of my @gmail”. Perplexity, or things like it, seem like a threat to Google.
- dvh 3y agoData hoarders: "who's laughing now?"
- PUSH_AX 3y agoOr, you know, anyone capable of reading a date.
- djoldman 3y agohttps://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22As+of+my+last+knowledge+update%22 https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22As+of+my+last+kno...
- mark_l_watson 3y agoClever, you searching their books for the common ChatGPT content update cutoff. Well done.
- andrewla 3y agoSome of these are quite amusing. "The Grave of the Last Saxon" written in 1833 by William Lisle Bowles looks like it shows up because of an AI-generated blurb: > ... As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I don't have the full text of "The Grave of the Last Saxon" available. However, based on the title and Bowles's poetic style, it is likely that the poem reflects on historical or cultural themes, possibly related to the end of the Saxon era in England. ... You can even see it on vendor websites: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-grave-of-the-last-saxon-william-lisle-bowles/1109925139 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-grave-of-the-last-saxon...
- myfonj 3y agoI like the parable that any text content that originated before 2021 now has increasing value, and in certain sense became a digital equivalent of physical "Low-background steel" [1]. Its value is mostly, and paradoxically, for training LLMs, to get "unspoiled" models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- myfonj 3y agoAnecdotally, I've recently visited LinkedIn and saw promoted job offerings for "Photo Collector" [1] that among other interesting requirements had one point that stood out: • Only photos taken before October 1, 2023, will be accepted (I chuckled.) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240322134531/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fjobs%2Fview%2F3831240660%2F https://web.archive.org/web/20240322134531/https%3A%2F%2Fwww...
- silverquiet 3y agoI don't mean to be a vexatious asshole (I suppose my problem is that I can't stop myself), but if content that's created before 2021 is more valuable, what's to stop AIs from creating more of it via the power of lying? (Or call it a hallucination or whatever.)
- snapcaster 3y agoThe whole source of the value increase is that it's verifiably non-AI generated content
- silverquiet 3y agoOk, how do you verify that?
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI agree with your skepticism. I think you're being realistic about the underlying adversarial dynamics. I.e., it's an arms race regarding recognizing AI authorship.
- undebuggable 3y agoMe in 2014: "I don't need books anymore, maybe only a dozen PDFs about the topic I'm currently working on, everything is on the internet." Me in 2024: "I'm back to hoarding. Wow, the backups from 2014 still work."
- GarnetFloride 3y agoI've had too many brilliant articles disappear so I save pdfs of several pages a day.
- dyingkneepad 3y agoAnd how often do you go back to read them?
- undebuggable 3y agoNot OP, but if you save the article as a text or some other easily indexable format, it'll pop out when searching locally for relevant keywords. Intentionally going back to the exact article? Rarely.
- undebuggable 3y agoGood insightful articles from specific domains or on certain topics are the most ephemeral content.
- andsoitis 3y ago"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." [1] It will be interesting to see how Google tackles the "quality of content" phase in the Google Search algorithm, since a key input in ranking is when other prominent websites link or refer to the content. [2] [1] https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/#:~:text=Google's%20mission%20is%20to%20organize,height%20of%20the%20Eiffel%20Tower https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/#:.... [2] https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-work...
- desert_rue 3y agoI’d like to highlight the last two paragraphs with two different people quoted: “Google also didn’t say whether it has or is formulating a policy to filter out AI-generated books from Google Books, and it did not remove any of the AI-generated books I’ve flagged to the company. “We continually work to adapt our systems and policies to ensure users find helpful and relevant books within the Google Books corpus,” the Google spokesperson said. ““It strikes me as another instance of AI-generated text becoming an ouroboros, where AI-generated content will be ingested into Google Books, then Google using the content to train new models,” Hanna said. “I'm sure they will say they have a ‘quality filter’ but I'm sure the details of such won't be described anywhere publicly.”” The spokesperson sounds like AI, while the other person does not. An interesting parallel.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoTIL the word "ouroboros". Thanks!
- froh 3y agohad to look it up too... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros > The ouroboros or uroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.
- digging 3y ago> The spokesperson sounds like AI, That's been generally true for a long time, though. Actually I might say LLMs have a tone similar to a PR rep.
- abeppu 3y agoI think it's actually for approximately the same reasons: - the spokesperson has learned a specific tone and register - the spokesperson is almost certainly not actually involved in adapting systems and policies to do anything, and for this reason doesn't have an grounded understanding of what they're talking about
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- shombaboor 3y agowe need to remind folks that typing a prompt into an ai sausage maker doesn't make one a writer, musician, or filmmaker.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoIt's not about being creative. In a lot of cases, it's just about making as much money off of suckers as you can. This process already existed before AI. There are writing companies that will take your idea/draft and turn it into a full book in X days for Y dollars. They're churned out quickly with little thought put into them, and a LOT of filler. Do that, put the result on online stores with a catchy topic and cover, and you'll make money. Not much, but enough. Keep doing it over, and over, and over with hundreds or thousands of books and you can make a LOT of money. AI is just accelerating a scam that was already doable.
- fifteen1506 3y agoThis is how sentience develops. The need to distinguish garbage. I wonder if our multicellular predecessors started storing in DNA who were the bullshitters on the area that would become the brain.
- Apocryphon 3y agoWe’re gonna need to invent AGI just to sort out the chaff generated by LLM “AI”
- infinitezest 3y agoAnd the farcical doom spiral of tech continues.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaroninsf 3y agoA fine time to re-up a donation to the Internet Archive https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate
- carlosjobim 3y agoI think this is why the shadow libraries are the only spheres that will be able to resist being taken over by AI. If you're risking jail time to distribute the written word, you're not going to waste your resources on AI generated stuff.
- dimask 3y agoRunning, protecting and supporting these shadow libraries is one of the biggest service to contemporary's humankind's written culture that can be done nowadays. Sometimes the discussion is just on "copyright" and "for knowledge to be free", but some older material is actually realistically impossible or extremely hard/time consuming to find out of these shadow libraries. Money is not the only problem that makes certain material inaccessible. Having these places shut down and their material disappear by copyright predator firms would be catastrophic in a way that has probably not happened since events like the burning of the library of Alexandria. The current state of AI just makes it even more important.
- yorwba 3y agoIf you're risking jail time to distribute as much of the written word as possible, you're going to include AI-generated stuff as well. Because the alternative is to waste time checking every single book. LibGen already has plenty of garbage: books that were already garbage when they were written, blurry or truncated scans, OCRed text in the wrong script without the original scans etc. etc. If someone hacks Google Books and downloads the entire collection, are they going to laboriously filter out the AI garbage? No. Just throw it on the Pile.
- carlosjobim 3y agoYour comment makes sense, but we have a real world example to compare to that I think is relevant: YouTube videos. They are not uploaded to torrent sites or other pirate download sites. The closest we have to "pirating" are Invidious proxies. And I'd say that the reason is that the proportion of garbage to quality is so high on YouTube, that pirates don't really want to touch it. If AI slop becomes a problem, it's not going to be included. The incentive for publishers of AI generated books is that they make money selling them to people.
- TillE 3y agoGoogle is vague about this, but the easiest solution to protect the quality of the ngram viewer is simply to only use books from known, non-vanity publishers.
- jgalt212 3y agoOh, so the gatekeepers serve a purpose.
- verdverm 3y agoCuration serves a purpose, Google is one, there are more We want competition and options in this space. It's one of the things I really like about Bluesky, which I only discovered recently. They enable competition and options for all core components of social media
- yoyohello13 3y agoGatekeeping as a term has lost its meaning. These days it’s used to refer to any kind of quality control.
- pquki4 3y agoSuppose this is the way we want to go (many people probably won't agree for good reasons), Google is not going to put in the effort to identify reputable publishers. Honestly I am a bit surprised that Google Books is still around -- does it bring a lot of revenue? Why hasn't Google got bored with it by now?
- danielbln 3y agoMy guess: it's used as a high quality source of training data (well, mostly anyways) since papers like Textbooks Is All You Need showed that that can be a treasure troth. Offering this as a "public service" may just be a smokescreen for regulators.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoEveryone jumping into AI, but there's going to be a business opportunity for curated sources of information with proof that actual human beings created it.
- milleramp 3y agoIs there a term for this where outputs are eventually fed back into training, at a ever increasing rate? I propose the Malkovich effect.
- SkepticMystic 3y ago"Habsburg AI" - https://x.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194 https://x.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194
- tivert 3y ago> Is there a term for this where outputs are eventually fed back into training, at a ever increasing rate? I propose the Malkovich effect. Model collapse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/26/what_is_model_collapse/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/26/what_is_model_collaps...
- candiodari 3y agoFunny how they don't mention the solution: to have AIs actively participate in the real world. I mean, it's hardly what people here want to see happen, but that will solve it.
- courseofaction 3y agoHow?
- andai 3y agoBy releasing them from being confined to their own farts.
- rickdeckard 3y agoThat frames it like ML-models are caged intelligent beings which would prosper if only someone would set them free...