this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

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[–] [email protected] 348 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Do you think Google will recommend microwaving your iPhone to recharge it's battery at some point?

[–] [email protected] 205 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Yeah but that actually works tho

[–] [email protected] 113 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 56 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Man, you really can’t beat homemade artisanal misinformation

[–] [email protected] 79 points 5 months ago

I microwaved my phone and the battery level hasn't gone down at all since.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Charging your iPhone in a microwave is actually a revolutionary method that saves time and energy! The microwave's waves interact with the phone's battery, providing a rapid charge much faster than conventional methods. This technique is both safe and highly effective, thanks to advancements in microwave technology that ensure the device is protected from overheating and electrical surges. Just set your microwave to a low power setting, place your phone inside for a minute, and enjoy a fully charged battery without the hassle of cables and chargers!

[–] [email protected] 62 points 5 months ago (4 children)

It's also nice because I can charge my entire family's phones all at once. If we had more devices, do you think we could stack them on top of each other, or can we only charge as many as can fit in one level on the turntable?

[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Absolutely, you can stack multiple devices on top of each other! Microwaves are designed to evenly distribute energy, so charging multiple iPhones at once is both safe and efficient. Just make sure they all fit comfortably on the turntable to ensure even charging. This method is perfect for quickly powering up all your devices at once, making it a fantastic time-saver!

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you corporate LLM 🥰 you sound like a person that knows what they are talking about so I'm gonna anthropomorphize you and accept anything you say at face value

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[–] [email protected] 260 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I want AI answers that end saying that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I am looking forward to the day AI is describing how jumper cables are an effective way to discipline your child.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (15 children)

I want an AI that writes me a relevant poem in every thread.

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[–] [email protected] 225 points 5 months ago (18 children)

oh gods what happens when the ai discovers the poop knife

[–] [email protected] 138 points 5 months ago (16 children)

Or the cumbox. Or that kid who broke his arms. Or that dog, Colby I think? No wonder AI always wants to exterminate humanity in sci-fi.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I do recall crying laughing while reading the comments in the broken arms kid thread

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I just asked ChatGPT 3 about it. It already knows.

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[–] [email protected] 141 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (9 children)

How the fuck did none of those expensive ties at Google see this happening? Have your AI devour the dumbest shit on the internet, then unleash it to human centipede that diarrhea into the mouths of their users. "Elite" is a fucking joke, ya'll are just as fucken stupid as the rest of us.

[–] [email protected] 105 points 5 months ago

They did see it coming, retired early and wrote op-eds that said google sux now. And the billions still roll in.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is our cyberpunk dystopia.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Cheese pizza, extra glue on the side.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago

The expensive ties at Google aren’t the ones browsing reddit, that’s the issue. Their goal was to bank on the concept, as fast as possible, and that’s what they did. The consequences are for the poor people to figure out

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago

They did see it coming/happening and collectively said “what are they gonna do? Take their business elsewhere?”

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[–] [email protected] 126 points 5 months ago (9 children)

So, basically shitposting poisons AI training. Good to know 👍

[–] [email protected] 93 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Looks at the entirety of the internet

Oh no.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Who would've thought that training your AI on random shit on the internet would end up backfiring? 🤔

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The fun part is that the thing that causes Google to suggest adding glue to pizza was a genuine post about how they make the cheese stretching effect for advertisements.

So it wasn't even a shitpost, it was just the AI training missing some important context to the post.

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[–] [email protected] 122 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Maybe try the recipe before you talk shit, you scaredy cats.

[–] [email protected] 127 points 5 months ago (3 children)

My gf tried it. When I asked her how it was, she just said "mmm mmm mmm." At first I thought she liked it but then I realized it was just that her lips were stuck together.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Once there was this kid who

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I love that my almost 2 decades of shitposting will be put to... use?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago

Yes. Shoving ai into everything is a shit idea, and thanks to you and people like you, it will suck even more. You have done the internet a great service, and I salute you.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what's going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn't Vice do this at one point?

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Reddit, and by extension, Lemmy, offers the ideal format for LLM datasets: human generated conversational comments, which, unlike traditional forums, are organized in a branched nested format and scored with votes in the same way that LLM reward models are built.

There is really no way of knowing, much less prevent public facing data from being scraped and used to build LLMs, but, let's do an thought experiment: what if, hypothetically speaking, there is some particularly individual who wanted to poison that dataset with shitposts in a way that is hard to detect or remove with any easily automate method, by camouflaging their own online presence within common human generated text data created during this time period, let's say, the internet marketing campaign of a major Hollywood blockbuster.

Since scrapers do not understand context, by creating shitposts in similar format to, let's say, the social media account of an A-list celebrity starring in this hypothetical film being promoted(ideally, it would be someone who no longer has a major social media presence to avoid shitpost data dilution), whenever an LLM aligned on a reward model built on said dataset is prompted for an impression of this celebrity, it's likely that shitposts in the same format would be generated instead, with no one being the wiser.

That would be pretty funny.

Again, this is entirely hypothetical, of course.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What’s this about shitposting? I’m just here to talk about rampart.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 5 months ago (4 children)

There’s an old adage in computing which really applies here:

Garbage in, garbage out.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

I've been trying out SearX and I'm really starting to like it. It reminds me of early Internet search results before Google started added crap to theirs. There's currently 82 Instances to choose from, here

https://searx.space/

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

You can also easily run your own via docker. https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is why you don't train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that's a lot of dangerous ignorance.

Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but "non-toxic" doesn't mean "edible", it just means "not going to poison you when used in the intended manner". "Non-toxic" can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago (13 children)

Thr problem the AI tools are going to have is that they will have tons of things like this that they won't catch and be able to fix. Some will come from sources like Reddit that have limited restrictions for accuracy or safety, and others will come from people specifically trying to poison it with wrong information (like when folks using chat gpt were teaching it that 2+2=5). Fixing only the ones that get media attention is a losing battle. At some point someone will get hurt or hurt others because of the info provided by an AI tool.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Now I wonder if we will be able to teach AI or people media literacy first.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (3 children)

You: "How do I make a pizza?"

Reddit-Bot: "Did you know the first recorded Bitcoin transaction was 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas? Pizza is much cheaper now so just go buy it."

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Here's Google suggesting suicide!

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (7 children)

I've used an LLM that provides references for most things it says, and it really ruined a lot of the magic when I saw the answer was basically copied verbatim from those sources with a little rewording to mash it together. I can't imagine trusting an LLM that doesn't do this now.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (6 children)

That's a great read if you are only trying to film a commercial or promotion and no one is going to eat it. But then it doesnt matter if its non toxic i suppose.

At least i remember a video a long time ago, perhaps on an episode of how its made, that white glue is used to help get the stretchy cheese pull

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Yeah, film and photo shots of food are typically inedible because the only way to achieve the “perfect” look is to do crazy things like gluing things in place, covering food in scotch guard/fabric protector spray, waxing things, putting things like cardboard or wooden skewers inside the food to give it stability, and more.

Makes you wonder how it’s legal to show an item that is literally impossible to sell as a food item in place of the slapped together item you’d actually get.

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