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Google's Gemini in search just makes up something that arbitrarily appears to support the query without care for context and accuracy. Pure confabulation. Try i

• ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
  gemini is the worst LLM I've used, whether directly or through search. As in your experience, it regularly makes stuff up, like language/application features, or command flags (including regarding google products), and provides helpful references to sources which do not say what is cited from them. in my case, it does so roughly half the time, which is the worst proportion, because that means I can't even slightly rely upon the truth being the opposite of the output.
  • JimDabell 1y ago
    Gemini was underwhelming until 2.5 Pro came along, which is very good. But in my experience all of the Google models are far worse than everything else when it comes to hallucination.
    • MangoToupe 1y ago
      As a corollary, though, the chatbots are probably the most creative.
      • mdp2021 1y ago
        Professional creatives do measure their intuitions against a number of constraints...
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
• flomo 1y ago
  I had a question about my car, so I googled '[year] [make] [model] [feature]'. This seems like the sort of thing that Google had always absolutely nailed. But now, 90% of the page was ai slop about wrong model, wrong year, even the wrong make. (There was one youtube which was sorta informative, so some credit.) But way way down on at the very the bottom of the page, there was the classic google search answer on a totally unrelated car forum. Thanks CamaroZ28.com!
  • camillomiller 1y ago
    This is a very very good point. If this was happening with different queries that we never used, or a new type of questions/queries than I would have some patience. But it happens exactly with the formulations that were giving you the best results in the SERP before!
  • TeMPOraL 1y ago
    That was true before AI too (I know, I did such searches myself). Google results has been drowning in slop for over a decade now - it was just human-generated slop, aka. content marketing and SEO stuff. I'm not defending the AI feature here, just trying to frame the problem: the lies and hallucinations were already there, but nobody cared because apparently people don't mind being constantly lied to by other people.
    • flomo 1y ago
      No, I'm not complaining about SEO shit... The thing is the primordial google had the answer, but Google themselves buried it under 100+ links of Google-generated slopdiarrhea, most of which didn't even factually fit the question, and was not at all relevant to my automobile.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        Indeed, this is part of the current monopoly abuse case they're facing — did Google deliberately choose to make search worse, because that causes people to return to the search results page and spend more time looking at ads, and they knew they could get away with it? e.g. bottom of first page, penultimate paragraph https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf
• MangoToupe 1y ago
  I'm honestly so confused how people use LLMs as a replacement for search. All chatbots can ever find are data tangential to the stuff I want (eg i ask for a source, it gives me a quote). Maybe i was just holding search wrong?
  • Garlef 1y ago
    Maybe that's because we're conditioned by the UX of search. But another thing I find even more surprising is that, at least initially, many expected that the LLMs would give them access to some form of higher truth.
    • MangoToupe 1y ago
      I think you might be on to something. I've found myself irritated that i can't just chuck keywords at LLMs.
  • MaxikCZ 1y ago
    Its good to be shown direction. When I only have a vauge idea of what I want, AI usually helps me frame it into searchable terms I had no clue existed.
  • mdp2021 1y ago
    > LLMs as a replacement for search Some people expect LLMs as part of a better "search". LLMs should be integrated to search, as a natural application: search results can heavily depend on happy phrasing, search engines work through sparse keywords, and LLMs allow to use structured natural language (not "foo bar baz" but "Which foo did a bar baz?" - which should be resistant to terms variation and exclude different semantics related to those otherwise sparse terms). But it has to be done properly - understand the question, find material, verify the material, produce a draft reply, verify the draft vis-a-vis the material, maybe iterate...
    • 1659447091 1y ago
      DuckDuckGo Ai assist is going in the right direction, imo. It will pull info from wikipedia, use math and map tools plus other web sources that has been mostly accurate for me on the search page. The chat option uses gpt-4o with web search and was able to provide links to colonial map resources I was curious about after falling down that rabbit hole. It also gave me general (& proper) present day map links to the places I was looking for in the map sites I asked for. It did get confused a few times when I was trying to get present day names of old places I had forgot; like Charles River in Va that it kept trying to send me to Boston or Charles City Co on the James river and told me to look for it around there... The York river wiki page clearly says it was once Charles River. Maybe I wasn't asking the right questions. For more unique things it was pretty helpful thou and saved the endless searching w/ 100 tabs adventure
• camillomiller 1y ago
  This baffles me like no other tech has done before. Google is betting its own core business on a pivot that relies on a massively faulty piece of technology. And as Ben Evans also says, promising that it will get better only gets you so far, it’s an empty promise. Yesterday AI overview made up an entire album by a dead Italian musician when I searched for a tribute event that was happening at a Berlin venue. It just took the name of the venue and claimed it was the most important work from that artist. Funnily enough (not for Google), I copypasted that answer on chatGPT and it roasted AI Overview so bad on its mistakes and with such sarcasm that it even made me chuckle.
  • DanHulton 1y ago
    It's the unfounded promises that this will be solved because the tech will only get better that really upset me. Because sure, it will get better, I'm pretty certain of that. They'll have additional capabilities, they'll have access to more-recent data, etc. But "better" does not necessarily equate to "will fix the lying problem." That's a problem that is BAKED INTO the technology, and requires some kind of different approach to solve -- you can't just keep making a hammer bigger and bigger in the hopes that one day it'll turn into a screwdriver. Before LLMs really took off, we were in the middle of an "AI winter", where there just weren't any promising techs, at least none with sufficient funding attached to them. And it's WORSE now. LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, and all of the funding out of other avenues of research. Technologies that were "10-20" years away now might be 30-40, because there's fewer people researching them, with less money, and they might even be completely different people trying to restart the research after the old ones got recruited away to work on LLMs!
    • mountainriver 1y ago
      I really don’t understand the whole AI winter talk all the time. We haven’t had anything of the sort since 2008. There were tons of major RL advancements before ChatGPT that were stunning. I would challenge anyone to find data to actually support any of these claims. ML spending has been up since deep learning year over year and the models just keep getting better
• XorNot 1y ago
  I use ublock to remove Gemini responses from search, because even glancing at then is liable to bias my assumption about whatever I'm looking for. Information hygiene is a skill which started out important but is going to become absolutely critical.
  • justmarc 1y ago
    We can't expect the vast majority of regular users to have any of that skill. What is this going to lead to? fascinating times.
    • jobigoud 1y ago
      It's very easy though, Right click > Block element > Create. Overlays show which blocks you are removing. Sliders can be used to increase/refine. How can we make it even easier and visual? Customizing pages by removing elements should be part of the default browser experience to be honest. Like in the initial web where you would tweak the color of links, visited links, etc.
  • MaxikCZ 1y ago
    Half my browser extensions have sole purpose of removing shit from sites I visit. HN is like a unicorn that havent made me block a single thing yet.
    • alpaca128 1y ago
      Ironically that's an AI tool I would use - one that can dynamically filter content from sites according to my preferences, to counter the algorithmic spam. It wouldn't be generative AI though, and that's the only kind of AI that matters right now apparently.
      • jazzyjackson 1y ago
        Could be a good use of structured output, Llms work okay as one shot classifiers, you could define a schema that's just like, array[]{xpath:true/false} and tell the bot what you want to see and what you don't want to see.
• justmarc 1y ago
  And suddenly this type of quality is becoming "normal" and acceptable now? Nobody really complains. That is very worrying. Normally this would never fly, but nowadays it's kind of OK? Why should false and or inaccurate results be accepted?
  • celdon25 1y ago
    Complain to it enough times, remain resilient and you’ll eventually figure it out (that’s a wild card though). Or find someone who has and take their word for it (except you can’t because they’re probably indistinguishable from the ‘bot’ now according to the contradictory narrative). Iterate. Spiral. No one should have to go through that though. Be merciful.
  • chronid 1y ago
    Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT. Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!
    • justmarc 1y ago
      Sadly you are absolutely right.
  • TeMPOraL 1y ago
    We lost that battle back when we collectively decided that sales and marketing is respectable work.
    • bheadmaster 1y ago
      Hah. Good observatoon. I often get in arguments about how I tend to avoid brands that put too much into marketing. Of course, theoretically, the amount of money a company puts into marketing doesn't automatically lower the quality of their products, but in my experience, the correlation is there. Whiskas, Coka Cola, McDonalds, etc.
• Nursie 1y ago
  Yep, I was looking up a hint for the Blue Prince game the other day for the (spoiler alert?) casino room. Google’s AI results proceeded to tell me all about the games available at the Blue Prince Casino down the road from here, where I know for a fact there’s only a prison, a Costco, a few rural properties and a whole lot of fuck-all. It’s amazing to watch it fill in absolute false, fabricated tripe at the top of their search page. It also frequently returns bad information on subjects like employment law and whatever else I look up. It would be hilarious if people weren’t actually relying on it.
  • datavirtue 1y ago
    I the have had a lot of luck with copilot conversations to research stocks and trading strategies. I am always skeptical of results and verify everything with various sources but it does help me find/get on the right track.
• Kwpolska 1y ago
  Google recently started showing me their AI bullshit. This made me pull the trigger and switch to DuckDuckGo as the primary search engine. That said, some niche stuff has significantly better results in Google. But not in the AI bullshit. I searched for a very niche train-related, the bullshit response said condescendingly "this word does not exist, maybe you meant [similarly sounding but completely different word], which in the context of trains means ...". The first real result? Turns out that word does exist.
  • christophilus 1y ago
    What’s the word?
  • dijksterhuis 1y ago
    fyi, you can remove any and all “ai” assistant bs etc from DDG if you use the noai subdomain (in case you wanna avoid their stuff, although it’s much less prominent anyway) https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
  • datavirtue 1y ago
    I switched to DDG over seven years ago and just realized it had been that long when I read your comment. Google started wasting my time and I had to shift.
• christophilus 1y ago
  I’ve had good results with Brave search, which self reports to use: Meta Llama 3, Mistral / Mixtral, and CodeLLM. It’s not always 100% accurate, but it’s almost always done the trick and saved me digging through more docs than necessary.
• veunes 1y ago
  Yeah, it feels like we've crossed into a weird uncanny valley where AI outputs sound smarter than ever, but the underlying logic (or lack thereof) hasn't caught up
  • roywiggins 1y ago
    I think it's just much easier for an LLM to learn how to be convincing than it is to actually be accurate. It just has to convince RLHF trainers that it's right, not actually be right. And the first one is a general skill that can be learned and applied to anything. https://arxiv.org/html/2409.12822v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2409.12822v1