You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked “What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that’s big.”
But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
If you don’t know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won’t refine your search. You’ll just accept the bad answer and move on.
Your logic doesn’t follow. If someone doesn’t know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won’t be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?
I don’t believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that’s not what most people expect from a search engine.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.
They offer the most accurate results of search engines you’re familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that’s a low bar and sinking quick.
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.