this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)

Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these "hallucinations" are an "inherent feature" of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature "is still an unsolved problem."

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you've scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let's just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit.

Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once...

Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.

You can't throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.

AI needs that guided teaching too.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…

Genuine question: do you know that's what happened? This type of implementation can suggest things like this without it having to be in the training data in that format.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

In this case, it seems pretty likely. We know Google paid Reddit to train on their data, and the result used the exact same measurement from this comment suggesting putting Elmer’s glue in the pizza:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/

And their deal with Reddit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-ai-training/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's going to be hilarious to see these companies eventually abandon Reddit because it's giving them awful results, and then they're completely fucked

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

You're wrong. Anyone who has ever used Google knows Reddit is an absolute goldmine of valuable information. The problem is it's also full of jokes and puns and bad information, and AI isn't able to sort one from the other (yet).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Genuine question: do you know that’s what happened?

Yes

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Most published journal articles are horseshit, so I guess we should be okay with this too."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

No, it's simply contradicting the claim that it is possible.

We literally don't know how to fix it. We can put on bandaids, like training on "better" data and fine-tune it to say "I don't know" half the time. But the fundamental problem is simply not solved yet.