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.”
As someone who actually has used most of these applications and has to learn how to keep up with it for my own professional reasons, I am speaking from a place of education that this isn’t going to help as many of us as it supposedly is helping you. Nothing you write can make me feel positive about the immediate future.
I know the tech will transform our society, I know it will change everything. I’m not disputing that.
I’m disputing the absolute fucking adoration and hype that you and others are gushing all over this tech like it’s daddy’s big fat knob that has to be lubricated constantly. It’s disgusting because right now it’s all hype and bullshit and exaggeration. It’s making everything worse. We’re a LONG fucking way from transforming humanity for the better with this, that goal is far further away and on the other side of a lot worse hardships that people are cowardly dodging, and none of this is going into helping the people who need the help the most in our world.
It’s so very yay and happy that it makes you feel important at work using shortcuts. I’m sure that you feel special being able to be lazier at work. Yippee. Now please fix the internet while we wait for things to get as good as you’re promising. Please, fix it. It’s getting worse every second with slop we didn’t ask for. I’m sure with all your shortcuts you can do the work of a team to solve this mess.
Yes, I’ll keep using it because it helps me get things done faster, just like vehicles help me move faster.
Read everything you wrote again. You’re so toxic and irrational. It’s just a tool man, just understand its limitations and work with it. It’s very useful even if it isn’t perfect.