5 ms·

> What scares me about this new AI mode thingy What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I

by burnte 5mo ago

> What scares me about this new AI mode thingy What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy. In my experience, the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time. I just did a search today about an error talking about a disconnected link between apps, and Google AI result summary told me that the error was related to my pulling a USB drive too quickly in windows. The ONLY word similar to my query and that AI response was the word "disconnect". Everything else was clearly about the SaaS apps. I have people coming to me, asking me questions, then telling my Google told them something else, so now I have to waste time convincing them that it's wrong. Over the past 2 years AI has done nothing for me but complicate my work life. And of course, this could be because the model is crap, but it could be because they want me to keep refining my query over and over for more ad views. Either way, it's a terrible experience.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
sanitycheck 5mo ago
Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers. Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.
- RyanOD 5mo ago
  It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it. To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions. Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
  - thwarted 5mo ago
    When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.
    - RyanOD 5mo ago
      In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.
      - makeitdouble 5mo ago
        "possible to choose" doesn't get us much. An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance. There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam. For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
        RyanOD 5mo ago
        Organic search dying was my first reaction too. But, who knows...this wouldn't be the first time I've heard that.
      - Barbing 5mo ago
        They are showing billions of people a big bold answer at the top of all their pages. What a wildly irresponsible company
      - rbits 5mo ago
        Go to Google right now and search anything. What is the very first thing you see?
  - 5mo ago
- pants2 5mo ago
  Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
- Robotbeat 5mo ago
  I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
  - tveita 5mo ago
    The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably. With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about
    - Robotbeat 5mo ago
      Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.
- awesome_dude 5mo ago
  To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy. There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer
youre-wrong3 5mo ago
[flagged]
- qurren 5mo ago
  Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information. e.g. search for "how do you make money with options" Google's AI says "When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down." Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.
  - ddalex 5mo ago
    In fact, more then what the call seller expects, not the market.
  - apsurd 5mo ago
    This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach. Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.
    - qurren 5mo ago
      The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust. If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage. I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.
xorcist 5mo ago
It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure. I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them? It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.
- kyleee 5mo ago
  I’ll bet they intentionally obfuscate so people can’t find the actual sources of info used for the answers
- consp 5mo ago
  > It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM. My guess is you can see this happening with the bots on Reddit where they are refining the answers to one certain thing, often getting two or three the same responses in a row from different users because they have been enforcing themselves by digesting the output of other bots. Waiting to see when they cut down the sentences and start talking garbage.
WarmWash 5mo ago
Can you share the query?
dzhiurgis 5mo ago
Google has been around for a quarter of a century. People are still incredibly dumb and will believe whatever they like.
HDBaseT 5mo ago
The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said". Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top. I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it. /rant over.
godelski 5mo ago
> What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy What scares me is the massive incentivization to manipulate the results. With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations? Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.
arcanemachiner 5mo ago
Reminds me of this gem: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn5l9najq5ybe1.jpeg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...
- thincopperfoil 5mo ago
  Straight of of x-files s02e03
redml 5mo ago
accuracy hasn't been their priority for a while now - they just want people to click on ads
wvenable 5mo ago
Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.

by burnte 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

sanitycheck 5mo ago

Yep. For years we've been telling people to 'just fucking google it', and now when they do they're getting bullshit AI answers. Worst thing is, some of these bullshit answers will be medical, some of them financial, it seems pretty certain people are being harmed.

RyanOD 5mo ago
It seems to me one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching it. To stick with your post, consider people asking medical or financial questions. For a wide variety of reasons, many of such questions don't have an answer. In such cases, AI is still going to take a crack at it. AI shouldn't be blamed for "bullshit answers" to such questions. Before using AI, I think people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question? Is AI the right choice?"
- thwarted 5mo ago
  When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.
  - RyanOD 5mo ago
    In watching the demo, I didn't come away with the impression that they were removing search results. Yes, they are pushing AI hard, but users can still opt to use Google in the more traditional way. Unless I misunderstood the demo, it's definitely possible to choose.
    - makeitdouble 5mo ago
      "possible to choose" doesn't get us much. An interesting aspect of this is the decrease in quality feedback on th organic links. If most people never get down to the actual links there is very little to tell which ones were good or if they had any relevance. There is also that less incentive to properly maintain the search algorithms to fight SEO and spam. For all intents and purpose, organic search results have been given a death sentence and are just waiting for the last moment.
      - RyanOD 5mo ago
        Organic search dying was my first reaction too. But, who knows...this wouldn't be the first time I've heard that.
    - Barbing 5mo ago
      They are showing billions of people a big bold answer at the top of all their pages. What a wildly irresponsible company
    - rbits 5mo ago
      Go to Google right now and search anything. What is the very first thing you see?
- 5mo ago
pants2 5mo ago
Yeah the Google AI results are more dangerous than ChatGPT, not only because it uses a smaller model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
Robotbeat 5mo ago
I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy
- tveita 5mo ago
  The point of LMGTFY is to land people on either the official documentation or a curated site like Stack Overflow. Google used to be able to do that reliably. With the power of LLMs you can Google a standard library function and get an inaccurate summarisation of a Reddit discussion where neither side knows what they're talking about
  - Robotbeat 5mo ago
    Stack Overflow and Reddit for years have told people to just Google it. And then the Google result is people saying to just Google it, instead of actually being helpful.
awesome_dude 5mo ago
To be fair - for all of those years Google has been serving up some atrocious results - remember when googling health symptoms got you rabies or pregnancy. There's even the meme where people ask if the code was the result of a stack overflow question, or answer

youre-wrong3 5mo ago

[flagged]

qurren 5mo ago
Depends on what you ask. It's pretty easy to get wrong information. e.g. search for "how do you make money with options" Google's AI says "When you buy a Call, you are betting the stock price will go up. When you buy a Put, you are betting it will go down." Wrong right off the bat, because it ingested a whole bunch of get-rich-quick bull on the internet. The correct version is that if you buy a call you are betting the stock price will go up more than the market expects it to.
- ddalex 5mo ago
  In fact, more then what the call seller expects, not the market.
- apsurd 5mo ago
  This is the problem with teaching and learning. Everything is wrong to some extent. I used to be this way but I don't have a better approach. Newtonian physics is actually wrong, the founding of any country will be wrong, biology is wrong, nutrition is wrong… what can we even teach? what should we teach in this lens? serious question.
  - qurren 5mo ago
    The serious answer is in the non-AI-summarized world, you can choose whose information to read and trust. If you want to learn about finance, you can learn about it from people who actually know what they're talking about. You can choose to listen to Jim Simons or Warren Buffet or whoever actually knows a thing or two instead of the rando dude you met at the bar. The AI summaries, on the other hand, ingested a lot of internet garbage. I picked finance as an example because anecdotally, most of the information on the internet by pure token volume is wrong. The Youtubers drawing lines on charts want your attention because they make money from page views; the financial advisors want your annual fees; the brokerages want you to gamble and get your commisions or PFOF (in the case of zero-commision brokers); the market makers and HFTs want your spreads; Reddit users want to show off their lucky, statistically insignificant profit charts for karma points. None of the above have an intention to give you good information.

xorcist 5mo ago

It's nice that Google's AI summary always lists its sources. It's less nice that those sources more often than not do not corroborate the summary. It often seems to be a few random links thrown in there for good measure. I have no idea why this is, but it is impossible that these links are primary sources of the data, if such things even exists at all. In which case, why list them? It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM.

kyleee 5mo ago
I’ll bet they intentionally obfuscate so people can’t find the actual sources of info used for the answers
consp 5mo ago
> It is certainly seems possible that the actual sources of the data is the output of some other LLM. My guess is you can see this happening with the bots on Reddit where they are refining the answers to one certain thing, often getting two or three the same responses in a row from different users because they have been enforcing themselves by digesting the output of other bots. Waiting to see when they cut down the sentences and start talking garbage.

WarmWash 5mo ago

Can you share the query?

dzhiurgis 5mo ago

Google has been around for a quarter of a century. People are still incredibly dumb and will believe whatever they like.

HDBaseT 5mo ago

The built-in Search AI is fucking braindead and people constantly come up to me "Google said xyz" and I just have to turn around and say "I do not care what the Google Search AI said". Whatever it says is a waste of time 99% of the time. Although people believe it, or consider it worthwhile majority of the time because its so simple to use. It's always there, always instant and appears at the very top. I would much rather people shove a question into a locally running Qwen model and tell me what it said rather than use the nonsense search model. I hate it. /rant over.

godelski 5mo ago

> What scares me is the rampant inaccuracy What scares me is the massive incentivization to manipulate the results. With AI ads you get all the power from big data aggregation, the trust/framing of an authoritative voice, and cheap personalization that specifically optimizes for what convinces you. It's too powerful. Even if it only works a small percentage of the time we're interacting with these things so frequently that a small percent is a large number. They're already feeding user profiles into these machines and there's explicit talk about having the LLMs optimize ad campaigns. It's already dystopian if it's ads to get you to spend your money, but people seem to dismiss that. Do we not care that this is also being used in the same way to convince you to believe certain things? To join certain political organizations? Yeah, these things help me write more lines of code faster (if we include all the lines from our design docs) but I don't like the idea of pointing a supercomputer at my brain and someone else using it to try to manipulate me. That's not a game I'll win. It's not a game you'll win either.

arcanemachiner 5mo ago

Reminds me of this gem: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn5l9najq5ybe1.jpeg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...

thincopperfoil 5mo ago
Straight of of x-files s02e03

redml 5mo ago

accuracy hasn't been their priority for a while now - they just want people to click on ads

wvenable 5mo ago

Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.