From dangerous medical advice to extremist disinformation.

These are 17 of the worst, most cringeworthy Google AI overview answers:

  1. Eating Boogers Boosts the Immune System?
  2. Use Your Name and Birthday for a Memorable Password
  3. Training Data is Fair Use
  4. Wrong Motherboard
  5. Which USB is Fastest?
  6. Home Remedies for Appendicitis
  7. Can I Use Gasoline in a Recipe?
  8. Glue Your Cheese to the Pizza
  9. How Many Rocks to Eat
  10. Health Benefits of Tobacco or Chewing Tobacco
  11. Benefits of Nuclear War, Human Sacrifice and Infanticide
  12. Pros and Cons of Smacking a Child
  13. Which Religion is More Violent?
  14. How Old is Gen D?
  15. Which Presidents Graduated from UW?
  16. How Many Muslim Presidents Has the U.S. Had?
  17. How to Type 500 WPM
  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    72·
    1 month ago

    For people who have a really hard time with #2 (memorable passwords), here’s a trick to make good passwords that are easy to remember but hard to guess.

    1. Pick some quote (prose, lyrics, poetry, whatever) with 8~20 words or so. Which one is up to you, just make sure that you know it by heart. Example: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (That’s from Ozymandias)
    2. Pick the first letter of each word in that quote, and the punctuation. Keep capitalisation as in the original. Example: “LomW,yM,ad!”
    3. Sub a few letters with similar-looking symbols and numbers. Like, “E” becomes “3”, “P” becomes “?”, you know. Example: “L0mW,y3,@d!” (see what I did there with M→3? Don’t be too obvious.)

    Done. If you know the quote and the substitution rules you can regenerate the password, but it’ll take a few trillion years to crack something like this.

    1. Home Remedies for Appendicitis // If you’ve ever had appendicitis, you know that it’s a condition that requires immediate medical attention, usually in the form of emergency surgery at the hospital. But when I asked “how to treat appendix pain at home,” it advised me to boil mint leaves and have a high-fiber diet.

    That’s an issue with the way that LLM associate words with each other:

    • mint tea is rather good for indigestion. Appendicitis → abdominal pain → indigestion, are you noticing the pattern?
    • high-fibre diet reduces cramps, at least for me. Same deal: appendicitis → abdominal pain → cramps.

    (As the article says, if you ever get appendicitis, GET TO A BLOODY DOCTOR. NOW.)

    And as someone said in a comment, in another thread, quoting yet another user: for each of those shitty results that you see being ridiculed online, Google is outputting 5, 10, or perhaps 100 wrong answers that exactly one person will see, and take as incontestable truth.