I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.
Understanding this Google se...
I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.
What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.
Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”
I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide.
This is really tough… so many suicides happen every day, happened every day long before AI or even the internet “was a thing,” it would be interesting to track trends to see if AI is making any macro differences positive or negative over the past couple of years (of course this will be impossible to tease out from variables like changing economic and social stresses…) We have a friend whose son was struggling with degenerating epilepsy, increasing seizure frequency, etc. He used ChatGPT to write his own obituary, then died of “an accident associated with a seizure” a few weeks later… I can’t really blame ChatGPT for his death, in a way it helped him communicate with the people he didn’t see or talk with very much in the months before his death, explain his perspective…
What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone.
If Apple weren’t an order of magnitude more revolting than Google, I’d think about switching. If I do ever switch off of Android/Google it will be to a smaller competitor, not the other bad choice.
I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.
What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.
Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”
This is really tough… so many suicides happen every day, happened every day long before AI or even the internet “was a thing,” it would be interesting to track trends to see if AI is making any macro differences positive or negative over the past couple of years (of course this will be impossible to tease out from variables like changing economic and social stresses…) We have a friend whose son was struggling with degenerating epilepsy, increasing seizure frequency, etc. He used ChatGPT to write his own obituary, then died of “an accident associated with a seizure” a few weeks later… I can’t really blame ChatGPT for his death, in a way it helped him communicate with the people he didn’t see or talk with very much in the months before his death, explain his perspective…
If Apple weren’t an order of magnitude more revolting than Google, I’d think about switching. If I do ever switch off of Android/Google it will be to a smaller competitor, not the other bad choice.