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> When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecture
by talldayo 2y ago
> When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”.
Good grief. Pal, you've got a name with 8 identifying alphanumeric characters. Of course it is going to collide with other identities on the openly-indexed internet.
- 8organicbits 2y agoThe article isn't about a name collision, it's about the photo: > confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name
- brookst 2y agoIsn’t that name collision?
- iainmerrick 2y agoIf it were a simple name collision in the way the original commenter seemed to mean, you’d search for your name, and see the photo and biography of a different person. The article writer searched for his name, and found his photo attached to somebody else’s biography. That’s an incorrect search result.
- deaddodo 2y agoNo, he found another person's biography near his profile photo for his X blurb. They were in distinctly different content bubbles, even if it visually looked similar.
- advael 2y agoThis reading isn't supported by the text
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoToo bad Tom Faber is dead so we'll never know the truth.
- brookst 2y agoOne day we’ll understand the mystery surrounding the death of all Tom Fabers at once.
- stefan_ 2y agoAs this article rightly points out, people don't tend to care for why your lossy abstraction is making them out to be dead.
- 8organicbits 2y agoTo me, a name collision is when two or more entities share the same name or ID. What's claimed here is that Google was showing the photo of one person on the bio of another person. That's an identity consolidation error, where two unrelated people are treated as one. The name collision presumably caused the identity consolidation error, but you can have name collisions without identity consolidation errors.
- tonynator 2y agoThat's name collision. The photo is chosen based on the name.
- jeffparsons 2y agoSo Google is presenting summary information in a way that very much implies comprehension, but without any comprehension of context — i.e. a name collision is enough to throw them off and result in unrelated pictures and bio being smashed together? Seems pretty irresponsible of Google to do that. And also, just... kind of lame. Google is slowly but surely changing their image from "tech wizard" to "kind of a joke", and they have nobody but themselves to blame.
- surfingdino 2y agoChatGPT and any other LLM does the same thing, no?
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoRight, which is why their content generation has gotten a reputation for being slop and their answers have become synonymous with hallucination.
- tonynator 2y agoIt's AI-generated, like anything AI-generated you should not assume it's totally accurate. I would support some kind of disclaimer if it's not already there.
- scottlamb 2y agoWhen I search for "Tom Faber", I expect to get results relating to a bunch of Tom Fabers. When I see a knowledge panel result, I expect everything within it to relate to a single entity, regardless of name collisions. If it doesn't, that's incorrect. If it's too hard to disambiguate, it's better to not have the knowledge panel at all. That said, I did this search just now. https://imgur.com/a/zEjrfte https://imgur.com/a/zEjrfte The top organic result is the author's X bio and has his profile pic in the search results page. To the right of it (across a gutter) is the knowledge panel about the physicist. I could see how one might get confused, but the X profile pic is just near the knowledge panel, not actually in it. So if this is what the author saw, I don't agree with the article. It'd be nice if he included an actual screenshot of what he's describing, instead of the cute "Why is Google..." thing.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoRight, which is why reasonable levels of humility and wisdom would keep an organization from expanding their mission from indexing documents to providing automated answers to questions.
- coliveira 2y agoTheir real mission is to sell ads on web pages. For this reason, they feel entitled to show web search as well as AI hallucinations.
- advael 2y agoYes, it's likely an unmitigable problem with trying to aggregate information in this way. That's why the value proposition of a search engine is that it presents information from primary sources, rather than trying to summarize it. Finding resources on other people with the same name is unsurprising, having the AI conflate you as it presents an aggregate is misleading, and enough so to be a real problem
- jjulius 2y ago> Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference. At this point they're certainly allowed to be surprised, annoyed (pick whatever word you want to describe it) that it's still happening. No need to be snarky, pal.
- fortran77 2y agoI read the article and what I understood that a "knowledge panel/info box" popped up with this living man's picutre and a note saying he was deceased. It wasn't just an issue of several results coming up for a person with a common name.
- jfoster 2y agoIs Google not able to predict the likelihood of a name collision as you just did? Is your solution to just continue showing incorrect information?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]