Death by AI

Even those versions could well have been interleaved with other AI summaries about Dave Barry that referred to OP without disambiguating which was about who.

Be ideal if it did disambiguate a la Wikipedia.

No, this is very much an AI overview thing. In the beginning Google put the most likely-to-match-your-query result at the top, and you could click the link to see whether it answered your question.

Now, frequently, the AI summaries are on top. The AI summary LLM is clearly a very fast, very dumb LLM that’s cheap enough to run on webpage text for every search result.

That was a product decision, and a very bad one. Currently a search for "Suicide Squad" yields

> The phrase "suide side squad" appears to be a misspelling of "Suicide Squad"

Well it was accurate if you were asking about the Dave Barry in Dorchester.

I remember when the biggest gripe I had with Google was that when I searched for Java documentation (by class name), it defaulted to showing me the version for 1.4 instead of 6.

I know one story that may have become such an experience. It's about Wikipedia Germany and I don't know what the policies there actually are.

A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard it can be to prove them.

One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more with attitude.

When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There was published information about her in a newspaper and she could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the radio feature.

I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent years trying to get things right, and now suddenly Google and Microsoft (including OpenAI) are using GenAI to generate content that, frankly, can't be trusted because it's often made up.

That's deeply concerning, especially when these two companies control almost all the content we access through their search engines, browsers and LLMs.

This needs to be regulated outside the US [0]. These companies should be held accountable for spreading false information or rumours, as it can have unexpected consequences.

[0] I say outside because in the US, big tech controls the politicians.

I'm not sure that's the case, and it's quite easily proven - if you ask an LLM any question, then doubt their response, they'll change their minds and offer a different interpretation. It's an indication they hold multiple interpretations, depending on how you ask, otherwise they'd dig in.

You can also see decision paralysis in action if you implement CoT - it's common to see the model "pondering" about a bunch of possible options before picking one.

Yeah, after daily working with AI for a decade in a domain where it _does_ work predictably and reliably (image analysis), I continue to be amazed how many of us continue to trust LLM-based text output as being useful. If any human source got their facts wrong this often, we'd surely dismiss them as a counterproductive imbecile.

Or elect them President.

Regulation with active enforcement is the only civil way.

The whole point of regulation is for when the profit motive forces companies towards destructive ends for the majority of society. The companies are legally obligated to seek profit above all else, absent regulation.