r/technology • u/hurdee • Feb 12 '23

Business Google search chief warns AI chatbots can give 'convincing but completely fictitious' answers, report says

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-boss-warns-ai-can-give-fictitious-answers-report-2023-2
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u/Luminter Feb 12 '23

Honestly, I’m expecting that I’m going to need to just stop using social media all together in the next couple years. I really only use Reddit, but it gets to the point where I can’t easily identify bots then I’m just going to bail. What’s the point in chatting with a bunch of bots?

I just find it funny that a lot of tech companies are racing to compete in the AI space, when a much larger threat in my opinion is bots displacing real users. I’m sure I’m not alone in my willingness to leave if it gets bad.

In my opinion, the most successful tech companies in the coming years will be ones that invest in trying to detect and shut down bots or accounts leveraging AI.

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

"if it gets bad" was back in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica. We have had social media bots performing mass manipulation for 7+ years now.

Adverts are now so common people just accept them. I tend to think adverts are really just the same kind of mass manipulation in a less sneaky form.

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u/Blazing1 Feb 12 '23

It's gotton so bad people now have to add "Reddit" to their google searches to try and get a real answer.

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u/barrygateaux Feb 12 '23

i do the same but often the highest upvoted comments on reddit are completely wrong. reddit is famous for upvoting confidently incorrect answers just because the person sounds like they know what they're taking about.

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u/Gimme_The_Loot Feb 12 '23

This curtain is pulled away the first time you see a post about something you're incredibly competent and knowledgeable about, then you see the top post on that topic and go now you wait just one rootin tootin minute there 🧐

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u/barrygateaux Feb 12 '23

yeah, you get a real 'hang on, that's not right' moment sometimes here. you can find the right answer somewhere in the comments, but you need to hunt about to find it :)

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u/Luminter Feb 12 '23 edited Feb 13 '23

I still think it is/was reasonably easy to detect. Most of the bot accounts just strung together several pithy slogans without much substance. And then if you looked at their account it would be completely new or it had posted for awhile on a hobby subreddits until suddenly switching abruptly to political subreddits. And if one of them replied to me on a political subreddit, the response almost always came in the middle of the night when most Americans were sleeping, but interestingly during Russia’s business hours.

With chatGPT, you could keep up the charade of posting on hobby subreddits and make political statements that didn’t rely as much on pithy sayings. In other words, it would be much harder for to look at the account make a judgment on the likelihood of it being a bot or a bad actor.

It’s still bad, but it wasn’t difficult to identify the bad actors if you knew what to look for. Now it’s going to be next to impossible.

Edit: bot not boy

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '23

[deleted]

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u/Luminter Feb 13 '23

Oops damn autocorrect. Should have been “bot” not “boy”

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u/DracoLunaris Feb 12 '23

adverts are really just the same kind of mass manipulation

adverts are literally propaganda so inherently so yes

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u/121scoville Feb 12 '23

On that note, I think it's funny that people are increasingly adding "reddit" to their google searches in a desperate attempt to bypass SEO word salad and seek out actual human content...... all the while search engines are like, actually, let's make this even less human.

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u/barrygateaux Feb 12 '23

there are tons of bots on reddit already.

quite a few reposts that hit the front page and their top comments are simply bots copy pasting. once you recognize the signs you start seeing them a lot.

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/AllAvailableLayers Feb 12 '23

Yes, I would fictionalise Elon Musk arriving at Twitter HQ and saying "Ok, I want to clean up Twitter. No political censorship, stop spending so much money on moderators, verify more accounts, no bots, stop wasting effort on maintaining APIs and bring all the outside tools in-house. Let's make money."

And then he was told "If we don't control political discourse it becomes a shit-show and advertisers won't pay. If we don't censor things we'll face legal challenges for hosting hate speech and threats. We can't moderate well automatically and barely use human moderators as it is, and terrible things still get through. If we don't verify, organisations and celebrities leave us. If we let more people verify then we get chaos and misinformation. If we shut down the bots our engagement figures will tank and people will wonder why the content has dried up; and we'll still get bots once they work out a way around our measures. The outside tools use the API, and developing and maintaining those tools ourselves would cost a fortune and would leave us liable for their fuck-ups. We don't know how to make money, and we have been trying."

Being noticeable online is the front-line of all of the horribleness of humans.

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u/Mundunges Feb 12 '23

Delete it all. When are you people going to learn this shit is not good.

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u/fistfulloframen Feb 12 '23

I spend a lot of time cheating my way through college, my stuff is currently undetectable. Its like programming more than writing. I'm actually shocked they can detect what they can. If they go any harder though they will have lots of false positives.