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.”
Jesus. I didn’t even think of that. I could totally see that being a big part of why it is giving garbage answers.
Just imagine the average reddit, twitter, facebook, and instagram content. Then realize that half of that content is dumber than that. That’s half of what these AI models use to learn. The “smarter” half is probably filled with sarcasm, inside jokes, and other types of innuendo that the AI at this stage has no chance of understanding correctly.
Reminds me of the time Microsoft unleashed their AI Twitter account and it turned into a Nazi after a couple hours. Whatever straight out of business school idiot who thought scraping the comments of the armpit of the internet was a good idea should be banned from any management position. At least it is a step up from scraping 4chan, I guess.
The Microsoft Tay one I can understand though. Before it was released, they had also had Microsoft Xiaoice which had been in use for 2 years prior without this issue. Yay was just the English version of that.
The glue on pizza one literally came from a Reddit post.