Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.
Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”
Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it’s battery at some point?
Yeah but that actually works tho
frfr
Charging your iPhone in a microwave is actually a revolutionary method that saves time and energy! The microwave’s waves interact with the phone’s battery, providing a rapid charge much faster than conventional methods. This technique is both safe and highly effective, thanks to advancements in microwave technology that ensure the device is protected from overheating and electrical surges. Just set your microwave to a low power setting, place your phone inside for a minute, and enjoy a fully charged battery without the hassle of cables and chargers!
It’s also nice because I can charge my entire family’s phones all at once. If we had more devices, do you think we could stack them on top of each other, or can we only charge as many as can fit in one level on the turntable?
I want AI answers that end saying that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
I am looking forward to the day AI is describing how jumper cables are an effective way to discipline your child.
oh gods what happens when the ai discovers the poop knife
Or the cumbox. Or that kid who broke his arms. Or that dog, Colby I think? No wonder AI always wants to exterminate humanity in sci-fi.
Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what’s going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn’t Vice do this at one point?
I recall vice doing that at one time also.
They were always hit-or-miss, but we’re all worse off for them getting eaten by a hedge fund.
So, basically shitposting poisons AI training. Good to know 👍
Wanted to like, but 69 likes at this time
Is this real though? Does ChatGPT just literally take whole snippets of texts like that? I thought it used some aggregate or probability based on the whole corpus of text it was trained on.
It does, but the thing with the probability is that it doesn’t always pick the most likely next bit of text, it basically rolls dice and picks maybe the second or third or in rare cases hundredth most likely continuation. This chaotic behaviour is part of what makes it feel “intelligent” and why it’s possible to reroll responses to the same prompt.
I remember doing ghetto text generation in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) class, and the logic was basically this:
- Associate words with a probability number - e.g. given the word “math”: “homework” has 25% chance, “class” has 20% chance, etc; these probabilities are generated from the training data
- Generate a random number to decide which word to pick next - average roll gives likely response, less likely roll gives less likely response
- Repeat for as long as you need to generate text
This is a rough explanation of Baysian nets, which I think are what’s used in LLMs. We used a very simple n-gram model (e.g. n words are considered for the statistics, e.g. “to my math” is much more likely to generate “class” than “homework”), but they’re probably doing fancy things with text categorization and whatnot to generate more relevant text.
The LLM isn’t really “thinking” here, it’s just associating input text and the training data to generate output text.
Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator
Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.
Cyanoacrylate or elmers?