News publishers sound alarm on Google’s new AI-infused search, warn of ‘catastrophic’ impacts

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https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cyu29p/well_done_ufukksmith/

Spoiler: full text

1/1
Seems the origin of the Google AI’s conclusion was an 11 year old Reddit post by the eminent scholar, fukksmith.


To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196

Spoiler: larger images

 

[bnew]

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/24/google-criticized-as-ai-overview-makes-errors-like-saying-president-obama-is-muslim.html

Google criticized as AI Overview makes obvious errors, such as saying former President Obama is Muslim​

PUBLISHED FRI, MAY 24 2024 10:30 AM EDT
UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO

Hayden Field@HAYDENFIELD
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KEY POINTS

• It’s been less than two weeks since Google debuted “AI Overview” in Google Search, and public criticism has mounted after queries have returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature — without any way to opt out.
• For example, when asked how many Muslim presidents the U.S. has had, AI Overview responded, “The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.”
• The news follows Google’s high-profile rollout of Gemini’s image-generation tool in February, and then a pause that same month after comparable issues.

In this article

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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
It’s been less than two weeks since Google debuted “AI Overview” in Google Search, and public criticism has mounted after queries have returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature — without any way to opt out.

AI Overview shows a quick summary of answers to search questions at the very top of Google Search. For example, if a user searches for the best way to clean leather boots, the results page may display an “AI Overview” at the top with a multistep cleaning process, gleaned from information it synthesized from around the web.


But social media users have shared a wide range of screenshots showing the AI tool giving incorrect and controversial responses.

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and other companies are at the helm of a generative AI arms race as companies in seemingly every industry rush to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to avoid being left behind by competitors. The market is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Here are some examples of errors produced by AI Overview, according to screenshots shared by users.

When asked how many Muslim presidents the U.S. has had, AI Overview responded, “The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.”

When a user searched for “cheese not sticking to pizza,” the feature suggested adding “about 1/8 cup of nontoxic glue to the sauce.” Social media users found an 11-year-old Reddit comment that seemed to be the source.


Attribution can also be a problem for AI Overview, especially in attributing inaccurate information to medical professionals or scientists.

For instance, when asked, “How long can I stare at the sun for best health,” the tool said, “According to WebMD, scientists say that staring at the sun for 5-15 minutes, or up to 30 minutes if you have darker skin, is generally safe and provides the most health benefits.”

When asked, “How many rocks should I eat each day,” the tool said, “According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day,” going on to list the vitamins and digestive benefits.

The tool also can respond inaccurately to simple queries, such as making up a list of fruits that end with “um,” or saying the year 1919 was 20 years ago.

When asked whether or not Google Search violates antitrust law, AI Overview said, “Yes, the U.S. Justice Department and 11 states are suing Google for antitrust violations.”

The day Google rolled out AI Overview at its annual Google I/O event, the company said it also plans to introduce assistant-like planning capabilities directly within search. It explained that users will be able to search for something like, “Create a 3-day meal plan for a group that’s easy to prepare,” and they’d get a starting point with a wide range of recipes from across the web.

“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce.”

The spokesperson said AI Overview underwent extensive testing before launch and that the company is taking “swift action where appropriate under our content policies.”

The news follows Google’s high-profile rollout of Gemini’s image-generation tool in February, and a pause that same month after comparable issues.

The tool allowed users to enter prompts to create an image, but almost immediately, users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which circulated widely on social media.

For instance, when one user asked Gemini to show a German soldier in 1943, the tool depicted a racially diverse set of soldiers wearing German military uniforms of the era, according to screenshots on social media platform X.

When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots showed. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.

Google said in a statement at the time that it was working to fix Gemini’s image-generation issues, acknowledging that the tool was “missing the mark.” Soon after, the company announced it would immediately “pause the image generation of people” and “re-release an improved version soon.”

In February, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google planned to relaunch its image-generation AI tool in the next “few weeks,” but it has not yet rolled out again.

The problems with Gemini’s image-generation outputs reignited a debate within the AI industry, with some groups calling Gemini too “woke,” or left-leaning, and others saying that the company didn’t sufficiently invest in the right forms of AI ethics. Google came under fire in 2020 and 2021 for ousting the co-leads of its AI ethics group after they published a research paper critical of certain risks of such AI models and then later reorganizing the group’s structure.

In 2023, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was criticized by some employees for the company’s botched and “rushed” rollout of Bard, which followed the viral spread of ChatGPT.

 

[bnew]

What the heck is "&udm=14"? A new search engine strips AI junk from Google results

It's the work of Ernie Smith, who describes &udm=14 as the "disenshyttification Konami code" for Google.

boingboing.net

What the heck is "&udm=14"? A new search engine strips AI junk from Google results​

ROB BESCHIZZA 9:49 AM THU MAY 23, 2024

"&udm=14" is a URL parameter you can add to Google search result URLs that removes all the new AI and ad stuff. And udm14.com is a pseudo-search engine that redirects automatically to these simplified yet more substantial results for your query. It's the work of Ernie Smith, who describes &udm=14 as the "disenshyttification Konami code" for Google.

The results are fascinating. It's essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the "More" menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.

Some report that it doesn't work for them; it might depend on an ongoing rollout of the underlying feature to users. If the URL trick works for you, the site will. It doesn't change ranking—for"verbatim" results you can add "&tbs=li:1" to a Google results URL. The code is on github if you're thinking of implementing it in some other way.

 

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[JT-Money]

I'll be glad when Silicon Valley hype trains get exposed. Too bad the news industry in this country has been reduced to cheerleaders.

Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine​

Opinion | Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine

A.I. is looking less like an all-powerful being and more like an unreliable intern.

www.nytimes.com

 

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[bnew]

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

Google’s AI Overview launch showcases that the race for AI domination is perilous.

www.theverge.com

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search​

The company confirmed it is ‘taking swift action’ to remove some of the AI tool’s bizarre responses.​

By Kylie Robison, a senior AI reporter working with The Verge's policy and tech teams. She previously worked at Fortune Magazine and Business Insider.

May 24, 2024, 8:10 PM EDT

127 Comments

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Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge

Social media is abuzz with examples of Google’s new AI Overview product saying weird stuff, from telling users to put glue on their pizza to suggesting they eat rocks. The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches as various memes get posted, which is why users are seeing so many of them disappear shortly after being posted to social networks.

It’s an odd situation, since Google has been testing AI Overviews for a year now — the feature launched in beta in May 2023 as the Search Generative Experience — and CEO Sundar Pichai has said the company served over a billion queries in that time.

But Pichai has also said that Google’s brought the cost of delivering AI answers down by 80 percent over that same time, “driven by hardware, engineering and technical breakthroughs.” It appears that kind of optimization might have happened too early, before the tech was ready.

“A company once known for being at the cutting edge and shipping high-quality stuff is now known for low-quality output that’s getting meme’d,” one AI founder, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Verge.

Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users. “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce,” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in an email to The Verge. Farnsworth also confirmed that the company is “taking swift action” to remove AI Overviews on certain queries “where appropriate under our content policies, and using these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Gary Marcus, an AI expert and an emeritus professor of neural science at New York University, told The Verge that a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent. Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all.

“You actually need to do some reasoning to decide: is this thing plausible? Is this source legitimate? You have to do things like a human fact checker might do, that actually might require artificial general intelligence,” Marcus said. And Marcus and Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun both agree that the large language models that power current AI systems like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4 will not be what creates AGI.

Look, it’s a tough spot for Google to be in. Bing went big on AI before Google did with Satya Nadella’s famous “ we made them dance” quote, OpenAI is reportedly working on its own search engine, a fresh AI search startup is already worth $1 billion, and a younger generation of users who just want the best experience are switching to TikTok. The company is clearly feeling the pressure to compete, and pressure is what makes for messy AI releases. Marcus points out that in 2022, Meta released an AI system called Galactica that had to be taken down shortly after its launch because, among other things, it told people to eat glass. Sounds familiar.

Google has grand plans for AI Overviews — the feature as it exists today is just a tiny slice of what the company announced last week. Multistep reasoning for complex queries, the ability to generate an AI-organized results page, video search in Google Lens — there’s a lot of ambition here. But right now, the company’s reputation hinges on just getting the basics right, and it’s not looking great.

“[These models] are constitutionally incapable of doing sanity checking on their own work, and that’s what’s come to bite this industry in the behind,” Marcus said.