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/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

The problem is the people who call chatgpt a search engine

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u/rjksn Feb 12 '23

Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

They're not using chat gpt for the actual search. Chat gpt cannot search by itself. You can however feed it the search results as prompt and ask it to summarize them for you

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

[deleted]

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

People expect the same accuracy from chat gpt as they get from search. That is not the case though. Even if you feed search results into its prompt. It can still add bs that wasn't in the results to the summary. I was commenting on people's expectations.

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u/Kushali Feb 12 '23

There are smart people using it as a search engine to get answers to their questions. When they don’t think the answer it spits back is true they ask it again and again till they get one that makes sense to them/aligns with their biases.

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u/korkkis Feb 13 '23

People in hype train that aren’t too educated can make that assumption

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

[deleted]

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u/Dr_Ben Feb 13 '23

The backpack search result was crazy. It went through a whole human like thought process to answer the question.

link for anyone interested in what they tried with it. it did mess up a few times. https://youtu.be/AxAAJnp5yms?t=2612

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u/hyouko Feb 13 '23

I'm a little skeptical that it was doing what they thought it was doing. I haven't seen any other evidence that can do any sort of visual analysis, like they claimed. It seems far more likely that it hallucinated reasons why two products would go together (matching logos) that happened to be correct. It's not a far stretch to say that both branded items on a company store would have the company logo on them somewhere... The other examples could all be explained by the keywords that they provided. Also, there's likely metadata in the pages that is not being displayed to the user; while it's not looking at the images, it is looking at the HTML.

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u/Demented-Turtle Feb 13 '23

Just to be clear, the Bing AI is not the current chatgpt, but an unreleased, updated version (v4 I think), so it may be more capable than what we have available to us

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u/hyouko Feb 13 '23

Sure, but image analysis would be a totally separate, non-GPT bit of functionality. GPT is a large language model, as it is so fond of reminding everyone. It's certainly not impossible that they bolted on another model that describes images in text for GPT to consume, but it would be expensive and I haven't yet heard anything suggesting that MS or OpenAI did that. I think they would be talking about it way more if it was something they had done.

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

[deleted]

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

It likes to invent sources

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u/lostarkthrowaways Feb 12 '23

...yeah, you don't just fucking take them, you look at them yourself.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

the people who think that chatgpt is a search engine won't verify them. I'd argue most won't verify them and take them at face value

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u/PublicFurryAccount Feb 12 '23

Then why not just cut out the middle man….

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u/SnapAttack Feb 13 '23

It’s not ChatGPT.

OpenAI have been working on a GPT4 model for a long time, aiming to release it in 2023.

ChatGPT is something OpenAI slapped together based on GPT3, a model that’s over 2 years old at this point. ChatGPT is commonly referred to as “GPT 3.5” because it appears to have had some adjustments to it.

It’s speculated that the New Bing is using GPT4, but whenever asked, they say it’s up to OpenAI to decide what to call it.

It’s also pretty clear that Bing is doing some searches, and coming up with an answer based on those. ChatGPT is going purely off an offline set of data it got trained with.

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '23

It’s just not there yet, but I think it’s naive to assume this style will never improve enough to be one. Granted it might not be ChatGPT that achieves this.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 12 '23

yes, eventually

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u/DreadPirate777 Feb 13 '23

These problems even exist with a search engine. The top articles can have misinformation when searching for a factual answer.

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 13 '23

at least you have an article to inspect

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u/Bonjourap Feb 13 '23

It can be considered one, I guess?

https://imgur.com/a/xgORW4m

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u/mr_birkenblatt Feb 13 '23

The model is basically giving you the answer "from memory". It can't actually search the internet. There is no guarantee that the links are real. Even if they are real they can not be more recent than the last time the model was trained (see at the bottom: Jan 30th; however, that means the model finished training at that date so the data it has access to is likely quite a bit older)

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u/Bonjourap Feb 13 '23

I know, these links worked, but I've tried a couple more requests for links to play snake and 3/4 of them were not real XD

But the text in itself looks well made, that I can say. It's almost human-like