Comment by mapt
4 hours ago
Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall"
"Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ"
"So... uhh... provide me a link please"
"I can't provide links"
"You're a search engine"
"I don't have a current connection to the Internet."
"Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?"
"Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description"
"I can't find that Reddit thread"
"I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up."
"This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?"
"I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length"
"When I google that I find nothing"
"Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique."
I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate.
I've encountered this as well. I'm pretty sure it is unable to produce answers involving some copyrighted works. For example, I was trying to find an old video and it filled in the gaps in my knowledge very accurately, however it absolutely could not provide an actual link to the video or any concrete content related to the video.
In my case I suspect the original uploader took down their videos from YouTube or there was some legal process involved. But it was very weird for the Gemini answer to confirm exactly what I was looking for but be unable to articulate in a way that helped me. Totally bizarre, as if the topic was ablated from the LLM.
I would much prefer getting a straight answer, "due to copyright I can't discuss this" or something.
This is literally Google’s core business… advertising, surely they could have offered you a link to purchase said movie or the studios that made said movie and then they could collect some revenue from it but nooooo… they send you, the consumer, on wild goose chases to duck duck go.