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Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination (gizmodo.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

193 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Google search isnt a hallucination now though.

It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with. For example, the "glue on pizza" comment is from a reddit user called FuckSmith roughly 11 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It instead proves that LLMs just reproduce from the model they are supplied with.

What do you mean by that? This isn't some secret but literally how LLMs work. lol What people mean by hallucinating is when LLMs "create" facts that aren't any. Be it this genius recipe of glue pizza, or any other wild combination of its model's source material. The whole cooking thing is a great analogy actually because it's like all of their fed information are the ingredients, and it just spits out various recipes based on those ingredients, without any guarantee that it is actually edible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

There are a lot of people, including google itself, claiming that this behaviour is an isolated and basically blamed users for trolling them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o

I was working on the concept of "hallucinations" being things returned that are unrelated to the input query, not directly part of the model as with the glue-pizza.

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

Your link does not match your statement.

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

A Google spokesperson told the BBC they were "isolated examples".

Some of the answers appeared to be based on Reddit comments or articles written by satirical site, The Onion.

But Google insisted the feature was generally working well.

"The examples we've seen are generally very uncommon queries, and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences," it said in a statement.

It said it had taken action where "policy violations" were identified and was using them to refine its systems.

That's precisely what they are saying.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago

I'm sorry but reading this as "Google blames users for trolling them" is either pure mental gymnastics or mental illness.

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

This isn't some secret but literally how LLMs work. lol

Yeah, but John Q. Public reads AI and thinks HAL 9000 and Skynet, and no additional will convince them otherwise.

[–] billiam0202 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Without knowing what specific comment it was, I'm going to guess it was on how advertisers make pizza look better in ads than real life?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Nope. They were just trolling and fucking around. It was obvious sarcasm:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/comment/c8t7bbp/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Here is one news source reporting on the fun:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/google-search-results-reddit-pizza-glue-cheese/

It was an actual shitpost. I had originally assumed the same as you, given that there are a few bloggers and youtubers who go through the tricks used for food photography.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No, it was entirely a shitpost.

Original was deleted this week because of the news.

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cyu29p/well_done_ufucksmith/