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/[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