Comment by burnte
7 hours 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.
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.
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model but because Google's knowledge graph used to deliver very accurate and authoritative information but now that's been replaced by a stochastic system in the same place, so people are used to trusting it.
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
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?"
The problem is Google's AI results get even simple factual questions wrong all the time.
Earlier today, I searched "pixel 10 wifi 7" because I was confused that GSMArena showed my Pixel 8 supports Wifi 7, but the Pixel 10 only Wifi 6. Gemini confidently claimed that the Pixel 10 does support Wifi 7 -- but that's not true at all. Only the Pixel 10 _Pro_ supports it, as I discovered when actually reading the non-AI search results.
And this is a question about a Google product!
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I asked it “how can I tell if a spray paint can is empty?” And it told me that the paint can would no longer rattle.
When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.
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> one needs to consider the complexity of the question they are asking before searching...consider people asking medical or financial questions...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"...people should stop and ask themselves, "Is there really a single answer to this question?
It's a bold position to say that it's the users fault for being lied to by Google. There isn't a "single answer" to most questions. It's still Google's job to provide answers that are accurate and reflect the best information available on complicated topics. That's what they're trying to sell us anyway. When google's AI can't live up to the hype "You shouldn't be asking AI such difficult questions" is not a great response, especially when people are just trying to get web search results and AI is suddenly interrupting with an opinion nobody asked for.
In past, people can trust Google. Now we should teach children don't trust "search result" from Google.
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
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.
I’ll bet they intentionally obfuscate so people can’t find the actual sources of info used for the answers
Reminds me of this gem:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn...
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.
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.
Free AI's are dumb. Extremely dumb. The Google AI result is dumb on purpose -- being smart requires more compute.
accuracy hasn't been their priority for a while now - they just want people to click on ads
Google has been around for a quarter of a century. People are still incredibly dumb and will believe whatever they like.
Can you share the query?
> the AI responses are wrong about 65% of the time
Highly doubtful.
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.
I tried this search. It gave a write up about buying and selling options, noting that the price of the stock had to move significantly, not just go up or down. It also talked about vertical spreads and iron condors. It touches on delta, theta, and volatility and their impacts, as well as leverage risk and potential uncapped risk.
While I agree that AI gets things wrong a lot, and someone should read significantly more before getting into actually trading options, this does give a decent overview to give a layperson an idea of what they are, and some key terms on what to look for if they want to dive deeper. That said, with this info alone, there are some sharp edges that would leave the person open to unnecessary risk if they went on this information alone.
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Is that really categorically wrong, or is it a correct-enough explanation for laypeople looking for a one-sentence answer?
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In fact, more then what the call seller expects, not the market.
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.
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Honestly Google's AI answer is about as right if not more right then your answer.
You can easily make money buying a call without the stock price moving a single cent (IV increases). Funny enough the stock can even go down and with a large enough IV increase you still make money.
It hallucinates greatly about many things when I ask about C++ things. Things that you can easily find the right answer in cppreference or by just inspecting headers in your own IDE.
Yeah it’s not 2023 anymore. So no it’s not hallucinating like you think it is.
95% closer to your expectations?
What, you think it's actually higher too?
If you think ai is getting answers wrong at anything close to the frequency quoted then it calls into question your usage and ability to use ai in general.
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