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When I posted this on Mastodon I had a bunch of replyguys arguing with me that โ€œitโ€™s not Googleโ€™s fault they show you bad information when you google for something on Googleโ€™s servers that uses Googleโ€™s algorithms to find things in Googleโ€™s indexโ€

This has been floating around for a while. ChatGPT has been updated since so it now works correctly, however the Google โ€œsnippetโ€ (not Google AI) wonโ€™t update because the linked website hasnโ€™t been updated.

I guess my point was more, technically Google did what it was designed to do. Based on the keywords in the search it found an answer that matched. Google is really stupid with literal questions and isnโ€™t backed by AI with natural language. So I canโ€™t see how it would fix it without using AI.

Yes, my whole point is that it's a bad product. They had a great product: search that worked well. But they stuffed it with shit that doesn't work. This is 100% Google's fault and they don't care because it makes them more money when people can't find shit on their website and stick around longer.

The problem with this check is it is pushing a posting on a website that published that AI response, not the AI response itself. And people keep seeking it out and linking to it, which keeps it high in the rankings.

To be clear, this is the page. Yes there is an element of "garbage in garbage out" since the human was the first to say there was no such country, but, even so, a better response would have started with the word "incorrect"... www.emergentmind.com/posts/did-yo...

emergentmind.comDid you know that there is no country in Africa that starts with the letter "k"?A ChatGPT example about the absence of countries starting with the letter "k" in Africa.

Yeah the joke is the "mark" is meant to offer "Kenya?", to which you say "Kenya fit these nuts in your mouth!". That snippet is from somebody evidently trying that joke on an AI, the AI not getting it because... uh.. robots can't fuckin joke, and now Google has indexed the resulting AI garbage.

To be fair the AI itself is likely a simple case of "garbage in, garbage out" (I mean in this specific case, I am aware AI often spits out garbage even if you don't put any it, but in this one case it is a "garbage in, garbage out" situation), but that's no excuse for Google grabbing it of course.

This is what I think happened bsky.app/profile/hele...

HELL Kennedy@helenkennedy.com

Oh my. I think I figured out what happened here. Some kid on r/teenagers posted "it's a fact that there are no countries in Africa that start with K" so that when someone replied Kenya, he could respond "Kenya suck on deeznuts?" But the AI bots scraping the web for facts don't recognize dumb jokes.

I think someone could have great success marketing a search engine that tries to filter out AI generated garbage. The amount of absolute garbage information on the Internet is going to sky rocket now that regular people have such easy access to LLMs.

I've seen this several times before, so it's not from "just now." I also tried to reproduce it, but couldn't. The likely cause for this originally happening is that text AI works in "tokens" (think syllables) and thus in its native language, "Kenya" begins with "Ken" which is different from "K."

my guy i been scrolling for like three pages to see if you ever do replies that aren't tiresome. You do not. You should listen to some of these people asking you to stop.

you really aren't made for this earth, dawg: being all earnest and shit where it doesn't apply because you can't tell what's humor is a really fucking bizarre way to insist you're smart.

I didn't say you're a liar, I'm saying that screen has been around for some time, and it didn't happen for me when I tried it. Maybe we're in different AI rollout experiments or something? Anyway, the error shows one of the many reasons current models aren't as "intelligent" as some worry/hype.

hmm at first I thought maybe it's trying to make a valid point, like that Kenya is officially Republic of Kenya, which starts with a K. or maybe if you think of the country name in Swahili or Arabic, it would not have a letter K.

but if you click the link it's a weirdly blank AI website (hosted in Cary, NC, i'm so sorry) that is just showing a chatGPT query. I think chatGPT gets it wrong bc it is over-eager to agree with the user. the user has asked "did you know there are no countries in africa that start with a K?"

if you ask chatGPT "how many countries in Africa start with a K?" it responds "Two: Kenya and Kongo (also known as the Republic of the Congo)" which is also interesting lol

anyway i guess it all reveals that AI chatbots don't actually know what letters are or what words mean, they just generally know which order they go in. is Janelle Shane on this site yet? ๐Ÿค”

Didn't take long to figure out that the featured result and several other results just lifted that text from an AI generated post on reddit. AI posts on reddit are poisoning google search and google is failing to stop it. Failing badly. This has been going on for at least a couple years

The really hilarious bit is that just below that text it shows the source for that โ€ฆ a site called โ€œEmergent Mindโ€ and the specific page is a ChatGPT transcript saying the same thing. So Bard is learning ChatGPTโ€™s idiocyโ€ฆ