I'm sorry but this has been a thing long before "AI" based results. Scammers always used tricks to end up at the top of search results.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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At the top, but that isn't what this post is saying. This is saying that Google's AI gave the scammer answer. Not that they provided a link you could click on, but that Google itself said this is the number.
It's not an AI, it's just word prediction, which also just follows stupid algorithms, just like those who determine search results. Both can be tricked / manipulated if you understand how they work. It's still the same principle for both cases.
Regardless of what they call it, they're the ones presenting it. I'm not arguing they can't be tricked. I'm arguing they are fundamentally different concepts. One is offering you a choice of sources, the other is making a claim. That's a pretty big distinction in a whole mess is different ways. Not the least of which is legal.
I'm sorry but no. It's not Google making that claim, it's just the LLM replying in a confident way because that's how they are expected to work. As I said, word prediction. You can install the tiniest / most dumbest model on your local PC too and ask the same question. It will give you some random hallucinated number and act like that's what you're looking for due to its default system prompt telling it to sound like an AI assistant. In the case of search engines the LLM is directly hooked into the search engine itself and just does the same thing you'd do and search for a hopefully fitting search result. So scammers playing those search algorithms to get a good spot will end up becoming the recommendation for the LLM to tell the user. It's the same thing, just displayed slightly differently. All the cool AI assistant stuff they try to present this as, is just an illusion, a word based roleplay. The only benefit here is that they can somewhat understand abstract questions, which is helpful for certain search queries, but in the end it is always the user's responsibility to check the actual search result.
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Scroll past the Imitation Intelligence summary to the actual links.
I get paranoid enough about making sure I'm clicking the correct search result and not some scam. I hope I would avoid any AI answers but yeah, to many people it could be confusing.
Having worked with AI and AI products in my last job before I was let go I can say this:
Out of the box AI is very good at the following:
- Mundane very simple binary/boolean tasks. Is this a yes/no. Can I find a piece of information that I was told is here based on your statement? Etc
- Condensing very complex processes into very simplistic things - NOTE you will lose a lot of information based on this action unless you refine a statement.
- Making overarching summaries - kinda similar to 2 but also its own thing, think more creating a summary of a book.
Programmed AI - read machine learning, because you are still telling it how to interpret things - can be good at (depending how good you are at telling it what it should do):
- Interpreting meaning in a statement.
- Understanding if - then constructs.
- Deducing plausible outcomes.
ALL AI struggles at:
- Interpreting real vs fake (thats why you literally teach it how to understand what a spot light is with your captcha)
- Understanding complexity in speech and tonal differences - I am SO happy to be here /s
- Thinking on its own - using collected data to make an inference that it was not directly programmed to understand
The big craze over AI totally was misunderstood. AI is best to be thought of as Automated Intelligence and the word Artificial at its current state is a complete misnomer.
This is just one example of people having been mislead by the name to not fully understand what is up with AI.
In all fairness, the phone number the AI response gave was most likely dreamt up by the AI and probably happened to be a scammer's number.
Well, I have considered it.
Well, stop it?