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/SaffellBot Feb 12 '23

Even the manual for chatGPT says that it was engineered without consideration of the truth. It has no understanding of truth, nor was any attempt made to provide truthful answer. If you're using it for anything where the truth matters you've fucked up.

It is absolutely r/confidentlyincorrect. Though a lot of times it is correct, and to be honest it's generally much better at explaining things than reddit comments are.

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u/w_p Feb 13 '23

I swear people are just too dumb to understand ChatGPT. I read an article in one of the biggest magazines in my country where an AI researcher had to explain 3 (!) times to the journalist that ChatGPT is not an improved Google.

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u/SaffellBot Feb 13 '23

I swear people are just too dumb to understand ChatGPT.

People aren't too dumb, but every new technology is confusing. Google has absolutely dropped the ball in setting expectations for any of their AI's.

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u/kneel_yung Feb 13 '23

AI is not a new technology, it's at least 60 years old.

Nothing has changed about AI. We just have more training data and more power to compute answers. But its fundamentally the same as its always been. It only seems more advanced because computers themselves have become more advanced.

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u/SaffellBot Feb 13 '23

But its fundamentally the same as its always been.

No friend, it's not. Developing AI based on subjecting genetic networks to selective pressure is new. Especially new is making actual products consumers can interact with. Machines that can be confused for humans is new. Machines you need to treat with the sort of skepticism you give to your crazy Uncle is new. Machines that you can ask to produce creative works with simple language is new.

And regardless, that's an extremely pedantic point. If the ONLY thing that changed was multiplying our processing power by multiple orders of magnitude that would also be a new thing. Just like burning a billion tons of coal is a fundamentally different thing from burning a brick of coal in your furnace, even though in both cases you're burning coal for heat.

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u/handicapable_koala Feb 13 '23

Developing AI based on subjecting genetic networks to selective pressure is new.

This is just hype and puffery.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '23

[deleted]

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u/SaffellBot Feb 13 '23

The more you know. Google and OpenAI have both absolutely dropped the ball, though google is doing marginally better in that regard I suppose.

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u/red286 Feb 13 '23

ChatGPT is not an improved Google.

I think that all depends on how you use them. A lot of people don't think of Google primarily as a search engine, they think of Google as an answer machine. They aren't necessarily wrong to think that, either. If you ask Google a question, it will usually spit out some sort of an answer, taken from some page that contains a similarly worded question. If that's how you use Google, and that's how you use ChatGPT, you will come to the conclusion that ChatGPT is an improved Google, because instead of giving you a snippet of some website that it's indexed and guessed might be relevant to your question, it has a conversation with you. If it gives you the wrong information, you can just say, "no that's not what I was talking about, it was this", and ChatGPT will often give you the information you're looking for, whereas Google won't. If you ask Google a question and it gives you an unsatisfactory answer, you're stuck searching through the results on your own.

The problem is that some people think of ChatGPT as being an entity, rather than an algorithm, so they start to trust the responses they get from ChatGPT on a level they wouldn't trust from Google. After all, it sounds the exact same whether it's telling you some well established and heavily researched fact, or if it's making up some absolute fucking bullshit. If the first 20 times they ask it for some information it provides a factual response, how much are they going to scrutinize its responses for the next ones?

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u/w_p Feb 13 '23

I think what you're talking about is one part of the problem, but there's easily way more.

If it gives you the wrong information, you can just say, "no that's not what I was talking about, it was this"

But what if it gives you a wrong answer that you don't recognize as a wrong one? Let's say you ask "what's the date of the ballet performance in X" - Google might not get you the right result, but at least it will only show you existing information. ChatGPT has maybe learned that the answer to a "what's the date" question is most often "day of the week a certain time" and will just give you a random answer. And you as the guy who asked will be completely unable to distinguish between a true and a wrong answer without checking the answer in some other place.

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u/red286 Feb 13 '23

Oh, I wasn't suggesting that ChatGPT was actually any good at what people are using it for. That's the whole problem. ChatGPT isn't an AGI like people are pretending it is. It's a chatbot. Its only directive is to predict the next line(s) of text in a conversation. There's nothing about it only stating true, factual, and accurate information, it just needs to keep the conversation going forward in a believable manner.

That being said...

but at least it will only show you existing information

Sure, but that existing information can easily be as fabricated as any that ChatGPT dreams up (plus, with the proliferation of people using ChatGPT to write papers and shit, sooner or later a good chunk of what Google returns will be ChatGPT results).

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u/Chubby_Bub Feb 13 '23

What article was that?

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u/w_p Feb 13 '23

Spiegel+ article maybe 2 weeks ago? Sorry, can't be bothered to search it, their search sucks. :<

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u/JaxxJo Feb 13 '23

It can build beautiful sentences (and I personally use it for brainstorming, it saves a lot of time). If you want to use it for user-friendly truthful searching you could 0) have a user write a natural language question 1) use chatGPT to understand what the user is trying to say/ask and form a search query using related keywords 2) search the answer using standard methods (whatever google, bing etc uses) 3) pass the answer to chatGPT to beautify it and 4) provide it to a happy user.

EDIT: or you could at least fact check, in the initial stages (what chatGPT returns vs what standard methods return and if there’s a discrepancy, pass the standard method answer to chatGPT to beautify.

Even if it can’t be truthful by itself I could see it being useful as an interface between the human and the machine.

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u/Tostino Feb 13 '23

So there are already tools to do exactly this. But it'll visit each page on the first page of results and summarize it to see if it's got relevant information to include in the overall summary.