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Google's Bard shows incorrect information in its launch ad
- andrewstuart 4y agoIf you are expecting AI to be correct then you are holding it wrong. The correct way to relate to AI is to listen and if the answer matters, verify.
- hcks 4y agoI’m expecting the marketing material to not have mistakes in it, especially when the gist of the article surrounding it is “we’re taking it slow because we want to ensure it doesn’t spit bullshit”
- latexr 4y ago> If you are expecting AI to be correct then you are holding it wrong. That’s not the message and expectation we’re being given, these models are being hailed as the future today. When something really bad happens because someone over relied on these systems, hand waving with “well, you shouldn’t have expected the answer to be right” won’t cut it. > The correct way to relate to AI is to listen and if the answer matters, verify. If the answer doesn’t matter, why are we asking? And if we need to verify, what’s the point of asking the AI?
- csours 4y agoMaybe the Butlerian Jihad will happen because computers get too dumb, not too smart.
- advisedwang 4y agoThere was a lot of stories like "Webb captures it's fist ever picture of an exoplanet" [eg]. My guess is that it's digesting those and not understanding that the "it's" in that sentence is critical. Here is a prior example of an exoplanet picture: https://esahubble.org/images/heic0821a/ https://esahubble.org/images/heic0821a/ [eg] https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-first-ever-direct-image-of-distant-world/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-...
- lucb1e 4y agoDid you mean "its" such as in <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359839>? Given your statement of this being critical... :) (Advice I also gave at work today: just don't use contractions and the right spelling will usually be obvious. In an informal setting, it's more tempting, but that's the way to easily check yourself.)
- advisedwang 4y agoHa, I initially wrote "its" then got nervous I was wrong, overthought it and did get it wrong.
- panarky 4y agoMaybe it's okay if the AI gets its grammar wrong sometimes, as long as it's less wrong than humans?
- dwringer 4y agoI like that this thread points out even humans have difficulty with that construction sometimes. We're trying to hold Google's language model to a higher standard than humans in this case I think. I remember "learning" thousands of bits of trivia like that from people who had misinterpreted something they read and misstated it in such a way. Of course Google has already been putting often-incorrect summaries/factoids in its search infoboxes for a few years now.
- michaericalribo 4y agoThis is a great illustration of the risks of LLMs. As a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. That's the whole reason to use the search engine in the first place! We're about to enter a dark ages of crappy AI products that are touted as game changing, outcompeting each other to be the best chatbot that can compose haiku about how grapes turn into raisins.
- CamperBob2 4y agoAs a user, if I am asking this question to a search engine, I definitely do not expect to need to fact-check the results. And this stance seriously hasn't bitten you in your life or career to date?
- kleiba 4y agoFrankly, I quite often fact check results I get from simple google queries. But I do agree that adding another level of fake news generation is a solution in desperate need of a problem.
- mort96 4y agoWe fact check search engine results all the time. But most of the time, such fact checking is in the form of looking at a result, considering whether it seems like a credible source, seeing if multiple credible-seeming results have the same answer, etc. Getting a completely untrustworthy, unsourced response seems worse than useless. Google has been going this way for a while, with its instant answers or whatever, but at least those try to cite a search result and you can read the surrounding context which Google got the result from.
- add-sub-mul-div 4y agoWe're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner. A few sources will control the information we get in a much more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from now. If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational search results distracting us, we'd never tolerate that in principle.
- blakesterz 4y agoEverytime I see someone finding something wrong about these things, I am reminded of Stoll in '95 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... He also had some similar things in Cuckoo's Egg. I wish I could find the quotes, but there was something about email not working all the time and therefor pointless to use. I'm glad people are finding all the flaws in ChatGPT and the LLM things now, but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better? From my very limited view, these things are amazing, and far from perfect, but damn the can do so much already. I guess I'm not sure why there's such a rush to dismiss this, when it's clearly a game changer in its present form, and yet so very new (at least new to me).
- rsynnott 4y ago> but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better? Not necessarily, no. There's a large aspect of garbage in, garbage out, to these things. > when it's clearly a game changer in its present form Is it? What's the game? Being wrong about telescopes?
- cudgy 4y agoAnd the more content that is created by these LLMs, the more garbage the LLMs will consume while quality content creators are simultaneously disincentivized, leading to worse content from these LLMs. Terrible image, but an organism cannot survive eating its own poop forever.
- squokko 4y agoI think there are two things to be aware of right now: 1) This technology is revolutionary and will change the world 2) This technology is very unreliable right now and should be seen as a tech demo rather than an actual assistant (2) is a big problem. Kids submitting term papers with wrong information is one thing, but people are using ChatGPT for things that they shouldn't be, given how many mistakes it makes: https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1573108 https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1573108
- ulrashida 4y ago
- DeRock 4y agoI asked the same question to chatGPT, and it gave only future-looking statements, I guess because it was only trained on pre-JWST-launch data. PROMPT: what new discoveries from the James Webb Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about? ANSWER: > Here are a few things that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might discover that you could explain to a 9-year-old: > Planets around other stars: JWST will be able to study exoplanets in more detail than ever before, potentially finding new ones and learning more about the conditions on their surfaces. > The beginning of the universe: JWST will be able to observe some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, helping us learn about how it all began. > The formation of stars and planets: By observing the clouds of gas and dust where stars and planets are forming, JWST will help us understand how they are born. > The secrets of distant galaxies: JWST will be able to observe the light from distant galaxies, giving us a window into their structures and evolution. > The mysteries of black holes: By observing the material around black holes, JWST will help us learn more about these mysterious objects and how they shape their surroundings. Overall, the JWST will help us answer some of the biggest questions about the universe and our place in it.
- partiallypro 4y agoBut ChatGPT just doesn't have this information available to it, as its data stops before it was fully launched. You can ask it about the invasion of Ukraine and it's completely oblivious to any major recent incident, it just will keep talking about 2014.
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- barelysapient 4y ago[flagged]
- partiallypro 4y agoI think there is a genuine concern that Google could overreact and launch a half-baked product in pure panic of being left behind or one upped by Microsoft. There is also a fear, I think, that the ChatGPT integration with Bing/Edge could not go all that smoothly. I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch, the press loved them...but now they are not nearly as valuable as they were touted (and actually lose these companies money.) Convenient, but not game changing. I think it's a waiting game to see what this truly does. I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this.
- RajT88 4y ago> I think it could be game changing in many ways, but I can also see both of these falling apart. Like that time the Microsoft Twitter chatbot got tricked into parroting white supremacist talking points within an afternoon?
- mouse_ 4y agoGoogle Assistant and Siri were liked by the press, but not by me. In contrast, ChatGPT has helped me out more than a few times.
- dougmwne 4y agoSame here. I treat ChatGPT as another Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. I know that the content is not fact checked by experts and I need to judge it accordingly. But just like Wikipedia can get you started on a topic, ChatGPT can do the same, plus you can ask follow up clarifying questions!
- esotericimpl 4y ago[dead]
- ren_engineer 4y ago>I do think there is unique break here though, because I feel that SEO has so thoroughly ruined search in many regards that this -could- be the right moment for this. the problem here is monetization, will search even be profitable if LLMs are used for most queries? It might become a Uber/Lyft or food delivery situation where these companies aren't really able to profitably deliver the service. I don't see many people paying a subscription for search and there's no way governments will allow "native" advertising within answers without them being signaled as ads, which would hurt trust in responses Microsoft might not care and just see it as a way to hurt Google's money printing machine and operate Bing at a loss or break even. Google Cloud and workspace are finished without Google's ad money funding them and Microsoft Azure and Office would gain
- pphysch 4y agoAt least it's being honest about LLM capabilities. If it only showed 100% facts, that would be false advertising.
- amp108 4y agoApparently someone missed the word "experimental" in the announcement.
- ceejayoz 4y agoSure, but they made an ad bragging about it. It’s funny that they fucked that up.
- rsynnott 4y agoFinally, a completely artificial version of the archetypical middle-aged man in a pub who is very confidently wrong about stuff. The ultimate triumph of ML, an replicant sitcom character.
- klvino 4y agoCliff Clavin?
- phist_mcgee 4y agoWith every pint he becomes more convincing too.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhat does experimental mean?
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoIt means society is the test subject, so pray we avoid every single possible pitfall that could lead to nuclear armageddon.
- trynewideas 4y agoA test that generates evidence or demonstrates a known truth, which Bard also apparently can't do, and which the marketing team didn't do before making this ad.
- sinuhe69 4y agoSorry but you’re incorrect. Oxford dictionary says: “experimental is adjective. 1. (of a new invention or product) based on untested ideas or techniques and not yet established or finalized: an experimental drug. 2. (of art or an artistic technique) involving a radically new and innovative style: experimental music.” I don’t believe you didn’t known the meaning of the word but you intentionally twisted it. I find it a bit ironic.
- MattIPv4 4y agoNASA: "2M1207b - First image of an exoplanet": https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-image-of-an-exoplanet/ https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag... "2M1207b is the first exoplanet directly imaged [...] It was imaged the first time by the VLT in 2004"
- jeroenhd 4y agoOf course it does, it has to compete with ChatGPT after all! Confidently and authoritatively lying is an important part of making the ChatGPT output believable.
- politician 4y agoWell, it is called "Bard". What did you expect? A bard makes up stories and sets them to music. Sometimes the stories are true, sometimes embellished, sometimes false. Ideally, they all sound good enough and keep the patrons entertained.
- xdavidliu 4y agoI was expecting it to take its bow, climb on top of the town tower, and shoot a fire-breathing dragon in the only part of its body not encrusted with jewels, but to each their own.
- antognini 4y agoI'm reminded of a similar instance a couple of years back when one of my astronomy professors noticed that if you typed into Google "mass of the Sun in solar masses" you would get back 0.9995 instead of 1.
- williamcotton 4y agoAnyone remember Google panicking after Facebook took off so they bought Orkut and rushed out a crappy “social app development environment”?
- simonw 4y agoI remember Google panicking about Facebook, shipping Google+ and telling the entire company that their annual bonuses would be tied exclusively to how well their work supported the success of Google+.
- trynewideas 4y agoNo, because it didn't happen? Orkut was rather famously a 20% project by and named after a Google engineer, predated "The Facebook" by weeks and Facebook as a global public social network by two years, and was shipped more as a response to Friendster (which Google had just tried and failed to buy for $30M) and MySpace.[1][2] Orkut had more users in India than Facebook until 2010[3] and in Brazil until 2011,[4] by which point Google had moved on to trying to make Google+ happen. 1: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2004-01-24-0401240092-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2004-01-24-04012400... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/15/the-friendster-tell-all-story/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/15/the-friendster-tell-all-st... 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20100828201838/ibnlive.in.com/news/facebook-overtakes-orkut-in-india-comscore/129553-11.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100828201838/ibnlive.in.com/ne... 4: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/17/facebook-in-brazil-a-big-ending-to-2011-finally-pushes-it-past-orkut/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/17/facebook-in-brazil-a-big-e...
- williamcotton 4y agoOh man, that was in-house? Even worse! I found the event I was invited to in 2007: https://www.wired.com/2007/11/google-summons/ https://www.wired.com/2007/11/google-summons/ It did not seem like they knew what they were doing and everything was very rushed.
- scrollaway 4y agoI think it's funny that in a thread about LLMs offering up incorrect information as factual, there's a bunch of anecdotes that present incorrect information as factual. You kinda did what an LLM does: Took a bunch of contextual cues (Orkut was owned by Google and ultimately shut down; Google often has knee-jerk reactions to the industry; Google started Google+ as a way to compete with Facebook; Google often buys companies as a way to compete), and spat out a confidently-wrong, summarized autocomplete based on that: "Google bought Orkut as a knee-jerk reaction to compete with Facebook!"
- LightDub 4y agoPeople shouldn't underestimate Google here. I'm not a fan (not for a decade ... Reader still stings amongst many other missteps), but I'm constantly impressed by how much better their Assistant, translation and speech-to-text stuff is versus things like Siri, etc. Almost as if Google handles the larger dataset that it has access to in a much better way than the other companies. I wouldn't bet against them doing that again here.
- capableweb 4y agoTo me they seem to be beaten at all of those areas. DeepL does translations much better than Google Translate (for the four languages I know and speak regularly), Siri does speech-to-text (and text-to-spech) better and so on. The only thing Google really beats the competition on is Android Auto, which is miles ahead of CarPlay. CarPlay still covers the entire screen when there is an incoming call, so good luck seeing your turn-by-turn directions if you happen to be navigating.
- krackers 4y agoGoogle products to me are the definition of mediocrity. They're "designed by committee" and play it safe, they're probably "good enough" for most people, but they're certainly not the best in class. As you noted Google Translate pales in comparison to DeepL, Google's TTS are worse than similar offerings from Amazon/AWS, let alone more niche focused products like Voicepeak, and you know that they're phoning it in for search given that there's a startup (Kagi) whose sole value proposiion is to use Google's own API then rerank results to achieve much better results.
- cudgy 4y agoThe AI is aptly named as Bards are storytellers. Plus, they are barflies, so the stories come with an extra twist — or is it shaken.
- amf12 4y agoIts fun to see all the people reacting "Google's Bard shows incorrect information", and at the same time say "Google is done, they couldn't even release a LLM chatbot first". Think how bad it would have been if Google released Bard first and it returned inaccurate information, or worse was racist. LLMs are just language generating models and may not be fully accurate.
- somenameforme 4y agoThat's not the point. ChatGPT says all sorts of stupid stuff. It's expected. Showing an ad where your LLM is saying stupid stuff, as an example of its capabilities, is amusing because it's obviously unintentional yet completely and absolutely appropriate. It'd be like a live Coke ad that said "Drink Coke and you can be like this guy!" while accidentally panning over to an obese manblob instead of e.g. Usain Bolt.
- bordercases 4y agoThey are incompetent and do not care. They couldn't even modify the ad to show correct information for lying's sake.
- college_physics 4y agoGiven that the flaws of this new approach to search would be more or less shared by any other effort based on similar algorithms, thus also openai/microsoft, maybe this is just a PR battle and Google declaring, "yes, we can outcompete you in recklesness and sillynes"... An interesting question is whether the inability to ascertain "truth" can be contained somehow so as not to lead to mass ridicule. I doubt it but not an expert in this area. My guess is that it would have to be limited to specific curated domains, a combined system that could be invaluable to knowledge workers but maybe not exactly the desired business model of "big tech"
- sportstuff 4y agoAI Test Kitchen already showed it's way behind
- gnad_sucks 4y agoSomeone responded that Google is terrified of being left being Microsoft. I think that's hilarious because it highlights the thing google should actually be terrified of - the fact that it has lost the capacity to innovate (same applies to MS, FB, etc).
- caconym_ 4y agoThis isn't incorrect, it's just ambiguous. The JWST did indeed "take the first pictures" of a planet outside our solar system (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148626359/nasa-webb-telescope-exoplanet https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148626359/nasa-webb-telescop...). However, we have previously directly imaged other exoplanets using different instruments—it's just that this exoplanet in particular (LHS 475 b) has never been directly imaged before Webb. It's the sort of question where you would expect an expert (or a thoughtful layperson with access to a search engine and a few minutes of spare time) to give a better, less ambiguous answer. However, since it is technically correct, I think it's a fairly minor sin in the grand scheme of popular science education, which commonly propagates actual falsehoods without the help of generative ML—e.g. iodine always sublimes rather than melting, aerodynamic lift relies on equal travel time of air on both sides of a curved airfoil, etc. re: this particular ambiguity, one does wonder what the model was "thinking", but I suppose it doesn't matter because we'll never know. --- I'm not sure if I think this technology is good or bad, because I don't really understand how most people use search engines. When I use them myself, I think I am fairly sensitive to ambiguities and logical contradictions, cross-checking multiple sources to extract a high-confidence answer or walking away if I'm not satisfied that I've found one. Most folks on HN are probably the same way, and I don't think generative ML can do better than us, yet. On the other hand, will Bard's results be better or worse than e.g. taking the first Quora result as gospel? I would honestly guess that, on average, Bard (and ChatGPT, etc.) will do better. So, less critical users may get better results from these systems. How many people are in the former camp, and how many in the latter? Of course, changing the dominant search paradigm will have an effect on all users. It also remains to be seen how the search vs. spammers arms race will evolve with the advent of generative ML search tools.
- richardjam73 4y agoIf JWST took a picture of LHS 475b then where is the picture? Isn't exoplanet HIP 65426b the first that JWST took a picture of?
- caconym_ 4y agoHIP 65426b is the first exoplanet JWST imaged, but it was previously discovered by VLT-SPHERE, which I believe is also a direct imaging instrument. So it would not be correct to say that JWST took the first pictures of HIP 65426b. However, JWST was the first instrument to directly observe LHS 475b, also confirming its existence for the first time. As to "where are the pictures?", IIUC these observations were made using a spectrograph instrument that does not produce a picture as such. The results are easy to find on the web with a search engine. One might say Bard's result is wrong in the sense I have proposed because a spectrograph result isn't a picture. However, given that the prompt explicitly specified that the results should be tailored to a 9 year old, I think that would be pretty disingenuous.
- anonymoushn 4y agoLast year Google showed COVID misinformation in its "suggested answers" above actual results, so this may not be worse than the status quo.
- omega3 4y agoPost-truth tools for a post-truth world.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoAnd this is why it’s not AI. There is zero intelligence in it. It has no idea what you’re asking it or what anything means. It is a huge markov chain and it generates random responses. It knows nothing beyond that.
- SilverBirch 4y agoWhilst it's funny this showed up in the advert, we do kind of need to temper expectations. These products are meant to be "Artificial Intelligence" - they will get things wrong just like normal intelligent people. This is why it's kind of why they're not well suited for search, because people who are searching for stuff need to be make their own judgement about the credibility of a source. Sometimes I need a high level of confidence sometimes not. If what you're expecting is for it to be artificially intelligent and omniscient, you're waiting for us to design God.
- philistine 4y agoTell that to the people developping the product. Nothing in the UI invites caution.
- hadcoffee 4y agoI’m thinking that even ChatGPT is overrated - to simplify it’s a query(smart/ai/algorithmic) to a very unstructured database (although translated to structured along the processing). The quality of response depends on how up-to-date the data is with your context. Unfortunately most of complex/useful responses require context. The worst part is it kills content ecosystems.