this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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372
‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw (www.wired.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Archived link: https://archive.ph/Vjl1M

Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google’s AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived.

This is genuinely fun, and you can find lots of examples on social media. In the world of AI Overviews, “a loose dog won't surf” is “a playful way of saying that something is not likely to happen or that something is not going to work out.” The invented phrase “wired is as wired does” is an idiom that means “someone's behavior or characteristics are a direct result of their inherent nature or ‘wiring,’ much like a computer's function is determined by its physical connections.”

It all sounds perfectly plausible, delivered with unwavering confidence. Google even provides reference links in some cases, giving the response an added sheen of authority. It’s also wrong, at least in the sense that the overview creates the impression that these are common phrases and not a bunch of random words thrown together. And while it’s silly that AI Overviews thinks “never throw a poodle at a pig” is a proverb with a biblical derivation, it’s also a tidy encapsulation of where generative AI still falls short.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I am not saying other generative AI lack flaws, but Google's AI Overview is the most problematic generative AI implementation I have ever seen. It offends me that a company I used to trust continues to force this lie generator as a top result for the #1 search engine. And to what end? Just to have a misinformed populace over literally every subject!

OpenAI has issues as well, but ChatGPT is a much, much better search engine with far fewer hallucinations per answer. Releasing AI Overview while the competition is leagues ahead on the same front is asinine!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

They famously taught it on Reddit. So it's not surprising that it just comes up with nonsense.

You would have thought that they would use a more stable data set. Although it does mean it's very good at explaining the plots of movies badly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Its a language model not a dictionary. By putting the term "definition" before the sentence you imply that the following sentence has a definintion, hence it vectors down to the most likely meaning.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Buddy, I never said the word definition

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

And to what end? Just to have a misinformed populace over literally every subject!

This is a feature; not a bug. We're entering a new dark age, and generative AI is the tool that will usher it in. The only "problem" generative AI is efficiently solving is a populace with too much access to direct and accurate information. We're watching as perfectly functional tools and services are being rapidly replaced by a something with inherent issues with reliability, ethics and accountability.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

In the case with Google AI overview, I 1000% agree. I am not against all AI tools, but that company has clearly chosen evil.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've resorted to appending every Google search with "-ai" because I don't want to see their bullshit summaries. Outsourcing our thinking is lazy and dangerous, especially when the technology is so flawed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I like that trick, noted! I mostly use DuckDuckGo as a browser and search engine now. If it fails I use ChatGPT

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Saying you used to trust google is really a core part of the problem. Google isn't a person. Just like AI isn't a person. They both do what they are tasked with. Companies prioritize profit. AI prioritizes giving an answer, not necessarily a correct one. That is how it was designed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Impressive how we seem to agree with each other yet you still found a way to insult my way of putting it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Wasn't really going for insult. Companies have spent a lot of time and money to indoctrinate us into thinking of companies like people. Noone is immune. That is the core issue. I probably could have been more explicite on that.