this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination (gizmodo.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

scientific accuracy is anathema to AI marketing

Even though I agree in this context “hallucination” is actually the scientific term. It might be poorly chosen but in LLM circles if you use the term hallucination, the vast majority of people, will understand precisely what you mean, namely not an error in programming, or a bad dataset, but rather that the language model worked well, generating sentences that are syntactically correct, that are roughly thematically coherent, and yet are factually incorrect.

So I obviously don't want to support marketing BS, in AI or elsewhere, but here sadly it matches the scientific naming.

PS: FWIW I believed I made a similar critic few months, or maybe even years, ago. IMHO what's more important is arguably questioning the value of LLMs themselves, but then it might not be as evident for many people who are benefiting from the current buzz.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's not, actually. Hallucinations are things that effectively "come out of nowhere", information that was not in the training material or the provided context. In this case Google Overview is presenting information that is indeed in the provided context. These aren't hallucinations, the AI is doing what it's being told to do. The problem is that Google isn't doing a good job of providing it with the right information to summarize.

My suspicion is that since Google is using this AI for all search results it's had to cut back the resources it's providing to each individual call, which means it's only being given a small amount of context to work from. Bing Chat does a much better job, but it's drawing from many more search results and is given the opportunity to say a lot more about them.