Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Google has finally addressed those unhinged web search results seemingly generated by its AI, screenshots of which circulated far and wide on social media this past week. In short, the internet goliath argued it's not as bad as it looks, though vowed to eliminate the system's baffling responses. For those who missed it, …

[sarusa]

Sure, polish that turd

This is the clearest example of Turd Polishing I've seen this month. Congratulations, Google Search is now not quite as feculent and terrible as it was this month, it has gone back to being as feculent and terrible as it was last month. Now instead of giving you completely wrong AI generated answers up front top and center, Google will go back to deliberately giving you AI generated search spam as your top results (because they get more ad placements when you have to click through wrong results). Wow, what an improvement! Consider your worms replaced with corn.

Well, I guess if you're still using Google Search you deserve all the abuse you get, ditto Google Chrome (where ad-blocker blocking is kicking in now too).

Or you could be a sane person and leave your domestic violence situation, though I know that's not much of an option where your work forces you to use them.

[Plest]

Re: Sure, polish that turd

Stopped using Google search about a year ago, managing just fine with DuckDuckGo and yes I know it's got the other class clown of the tech world, Microsoft behind it, but it's a much cleaner interface and results.

[druck]

Re: Sure, polish that turd

Using something based on Microsoft search is not going to be a way to avoid a

AI enshitification.

[MrMerrymaker]

Re: Sure, polish that turd

Yeah but currently DDG doesn't have AI.

[Snake]

Re: no AI

True, but as an almost exclusive DDG user I get to say that relevance has SUCKED for a long, long, long time and doesn't seem to be getting any better.

My recent experiment with Google shows that, if anything, AI has just helped Google 'catch up' to DDG's percentage of relevant answers.

So, as usual, enshittification spreads like diarrhea.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Sure, polish that turd

"but it's a much cleaner interface and results."

If you want to shop for things on Amazon, sure.

[jokerscrowbar]

To err is human.

Training the machine with reddit posts worked out well then.

When it sends the Terminators for us don't be surprised that they're all wearing Guy Fawkes masks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: To err is human.

4chan would like a word with you and belive me, it won't be a polite one at all.

[jake]

Re: To err is human.

"4chan would like a word with you"

4chan still exists? Who knew?

[jokerscrowbar]

Re: To err is human.

“Threats from Anonymous.

Wait, I’m in Anonymous.

I think”

[TimMaher]

Re: Anonymous

Shouldn’t you have posted that as AC @joker?

[jokerscrowbar]

Re: Anonymous

Probably the wrong venue to claim affiliation plus this way I get to take credit for an apt quote.

[JamesTGrant]

Re: Anonymous

From the final episode of ‘The IT Crowd’ I think

[David 132]

Re: Anonymous

Speaking of TITC, we should probably switch The Internet off - it's done.

Roy, Moss, would you mind? ...it's that small button on the top, I think, under the LED.

[IGotOut]

Re: To err is human.

The 4chan "freedom fighters" that use a copyrighted mask from one of the worlds largest movie corporations

Yeah, stick it the man. Go advertise the movie, that'll teach them.

[Snowy]

Not as bad as it looks!

No it is much much worse, but we do get to sell more adverts!

[Gene Cash]

"limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Um, ok, how does that work? Who/what is a non-everyday user? Vint Cerf? Donald Trump? Albert Einstein? Alfred E. Neuman?

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

In an ideal world, an AI would be trained on curated data which has a high probability of being correct instead of, you know, the Internet at large, but here we are.

[stiine]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

That would cost real money. Or they could have trained it on their book-scanning project's data...its not like they don't have a copy of most printed books.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Sensible books, the correct ones.

Mein Kampf, the Bible, Art of the Deal, that sort of thing

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

You do realise each of those books were written by aresholes. Hitler areshole, Bible written by kings and high priests, yup more aresholes etc.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Whoosh, goes the point, as it shoots over your head.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Really ?

Is any part of my statement wrong ?

Or is it too difficult to write a complete sentence so you limit yourself to calling people names ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

@CowHorseFrog

That whooshing noise you heard?

That was the point as it flew right over your head

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Wow you must be intelligent, i mean your entire reply is an insult.

[Plest]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Always makes me think of ouroboros, and certainly not in any of the positive depictions.

[Bebu]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

think of ouroboros

Snake eating tail. Her more under than over - head inserted into caudal oriface.

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Dumbass, you forget WHY Google exists. its not to provide useful results its only goal is to grab more eye balls for ads.

[Snowy]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Easy seeing that AI is so great it only reads post from other AI's, bags of mostly water just are not worth keeping around.

[Kimo]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

The Onion is staffed with professional writers. McSweeney's as well.

[Len]

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

Funnily enough the suggestion to eat rocks was reproduced verbatim from a piece in The Onion: Geologists Recommend Eating At Least One Small Rock Per Day

[jake]

You DO eat rocks as food.

Salt is a type of rock. If you don't eat it, you die.

Likewise, a glue is a bonding agent. If your cheese is slipping off your pizza, you need a better bond between the cheese and the rest of the pie.

[Falmari]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

@jake "Salt is a type of rock"

I going to go out on a limb here and say; Salt* is a type of mineral, not a type of rock.

"Likewise, a glue is a bonding agent." Not all bonding agents are glue, not all bonds require a bonding agent and is the cheese even bonded to the pie on a pizza. Bonded or not glue is not a pizza ingredient.

Neither salt or pizza are examples of eating rocks or glue as food. But still +1 for the twisted logic.

* Salt, sodium chloride.

[jake]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"Salt* is a type of mineral, not a type of rock."

Minerals are a subset of rocks.

* NMF ... but see Halite, which is commonly known as "rock salt" for a reason.

[doublelayer]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Are they? I'm not sure that's true. The set of minerals could contain specific substances only, whereas rocks can be made up of a mixture of those. A set containing a sheet of paper and a puddle of ink is not a subset of a book, even if books can be made from those things, and importantly, if you ask for stationary, it would not be acceptable if I gave you an already-printed book instead.

[jake]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"Are they? I'm not sure that's true."

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a rock is a "naturally occurring and coherent aggregate of one or more minerals."

[doublelayer]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

That's kind of what I said: a rock is a mixture of minerals, but not a superset of minerals. Especially as mineral itself is a pretty vague term. What we're really dealing with are compounds, or even substances, but that's so broad as to be no longer a distinction. Sodium chloride is definitely a compound, when found in the ground is classified a mineral, but I can make it out of metallic sodium and chlorine gas if I have those and then it's probably not, and although it can be found in rocks, it is so far from that that classifying it as a rock only works if I can classify almost every other solid substance as one too. This plum is a rock, just one with a lot of water in the middle bit.

[jake]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"a rock is a mixture of minerals"

Not necessarily. A rock is ONE or more minerals.

Or would you somehow claim that pure borax (Na2B4O5(OH)4·8H2O ... a colo(u)rless mineral that dissolves in water) is also not a rock?

"Especially as mineral itself is a pretty vague term."

Not really. A mineral is "A naturally occurring, homogeneous inorganic solid substance having a definite chemical composition and characteristic crystalline structure, color, and hardness."

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

If I fed my dog rocks, and he ste them, would that make him a "rockhound"?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"naturally occurring and coherent aggregate of one or more minerals."

It depends on where your salt comes from. Salt crystallized out by boiling seawater is neither naturally occurring not an aggregate".

[jake]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"Salt crystallized out by boiling seawater is neither naturally occurring not an aggregate"

The boiling just hurries the process along. You get the same result, albeit with measurably larger crystals, if you simply allow the water to evaporate. And yes, if you boil down a pot of seawater, you are left with an aggregate of small crystals on the bottom of the pot, similar to what geologists call a druse if naturally occurring (a vug is similar, but the small crystals grow in a cavity, not on a surface).

Note that this is an experiment you can do at home. It's also how I get most of my cooking/table salt.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

I was going to do a joke about sodium but I thought, na...

[DryBones]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Yeah, vernacular doesn't science make.

[jake]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"Not all bonding agents are glue"

Then it's a good thing that I did not say that, isn't it?

"and is the cheese even bonded to the pie on a pizza."

Not if it's slipping off, which was kind of the point of the conversation.

Glue can certainly be a part of pizza, where do you think the word "glue" comes from, anyway?

[matjaggard]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Can we really call the base of a pizza a "pie"?

[jmch]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

- a pizza is not a pie. not even a calzone.

- you can feel free to refer to any part of the pizza as a pie, but in all cases you would be wrong

- if your cheese (or indeed, any of your ingredients) is slipping off your pizza, you're simply doing pizza wrong

- you don't need a 'bonding agent' for cheese in pizza.... cheese IS the bonding agent

[Jellied Eel]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"Likewise, a glue is a bonding agent." Not all bonding agents are glue, not all bonds require a bonding agent and is the cheese even bonded to the pie on a pizza. Bonded or not glue is not a pizza ingredient.

AIs are dumb. No glue would be needed. All one has to do is polish both cheese and pizza so they're perfectly smooth and flat, and they'll bond naturally.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

The only "glue" that belongs in pizza is the gluten in the crust.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

I've never understood how a pizza can be a pie. It's a bit more like a tart than a pie, but involves no pastry whatsoever, so doesn't even qualify as a tart. I suppose in essence, if you want to get picky, pizza is posh cheese on toast....

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Heres a clue, maybe different languages and people have different concepts for pie, just like dif peoples associate diff colours with good or bad, etc.

[PB90210]

Let's hope they don't try training it on the Tory election manifesto...

"Fly tippers to get points on their driving licence"

[jake]

Points for a non-moving violation? Seems iffy, at best.

I think they should be fined fifty dollars and have to pick up the garbage in the snow.

_{Note to my fellow Yanks: "fly tipping" is inappropriate dumping of trash, often at the side of a back road.}

[Doctor Syntax]

"Points for a non-moving violation? Seems iffy, at best."

AIUI existing legislation allows for this if the vehicle is being used in commission of an offence. It also allows for the vehicle to be seized and forfeit. Fly-tipping is an offence. I'm afraid things are getting rather desperate when new laws are being touted, apparently off the cuff, along with National Service. I don't know why this National Service thing seemed a good idea. Those my age grew up with that as a looming threat over our teenage years, were lucky enough to have been just young enough to avoid it and can see no good reason to let it interrupt our grandchildren's careers.

[doublelayer]

"I don't know why this National Service thing seemed a good idea. Those my age grew up with that as a looming threat over our teenage years, were lucky enough to have been just young enough to avoid it and can see no good reason to let it interrupt our grandchildren's careers."

You've put your finger on the important difference: you care about your grandchildren, present or future.

[Doctor Syntax]

"your grandchildren, present or future."

Present.

One of them already on a vocational university course and at the age that this is being proposed, the other 3 years behind but already clearly heading for an engineering career. However, he's also quite competitive in a sport. That may not come to anything but the point is that those who become really successful at anything are usually seriously engaged in it by the time they're 18. Diverting them into a weekend a month for a year is really going to cap their achievements. Would a Lewis Hamilton or Ben Ainslie have succeeded if they'd been sidetracked like this? It's not my grandchildren, it's the ones we need to depend on for the future. It's potentially pulling down the best to the level of the mediocre.

[abend0c4]

It would be easy for AI to infer than fly tipping would perhaps be a smaller-scale version of cow tipping. And we all know that points mean prizes. So are they getting rewarded for their dexterity? Just goes to show how difficult it is to eliminate the weirdness arising from predicting lexeme sequences.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Fly tippers to get points on their driving licence"

Possible under existing legislation. In fact they could even have their vehicles seized under existing legislation.

[jake]

"they could even have their vehicles seized under existing legislation."

In many jurisdictions, using a vehicle (or other tool) in the commission of a crime results in the forfeiture of that vehicle (or other tool), ostensibly to be held in evidence.

[Neil Barnes]

You can tell when there's an election in the offing, because politicians suddenly start promising things they could already have done at any time they were in power...

[Jimmy2Cows]

It's not like we have far too many overlapping laws on the statute books already. Nah, let's add a few more to the pile. It's general election time baby! Must be seen doing someting.

[Anonymous Coward]

About these rocks…

Do they make vegan gluten free low salt varieties?

[Plest]

Google making tits of themselves...again!

Google's AI is a basically a fat kid trying to chase after OpenAI's car and chinning itself the bumper!

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Google making tits of themselves...again!

Where’s the evidence that OpenAI are any less rubbish?

[nintendoeats]

People ask nonsensical questions all the time, often because they have had no exposure to the subject matter. Those are also cases where people are unlikely to be able to tell fact from fiction.

[Mike 137]

Yes

"People ask nonsensical questions all the time, often because they have had no exposure to the subject matter"

People also deliver nonsensical answers much of the time for the same reason, particularly in 'open forums' where anyone can join in regardless of competence. Consequently, 'crowd sourced' information should be always be treated with a respectable pinch of salt, not arbitrarily trawled for teaching automata that are inherently incapable of distinguishing between reality and rubbish because they can't think.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

People ask nonsensical questions all the time

Like asking calculator apps to divide by zero. It's called testing, and clearly Google didn't bother doing any.

[Mike 137]

So that sums it up really

"Google is also limiting its reliance on info written by everyday netizens, which is how the glue on pizza suggestion came up: From someone called Fucksmith joking around on Reddit"

So the bot is just like the worst kind of bus stop rumourmonger, that repeats indiscriminately anything exciting it hears. Somehow, given how it works internally, I suspected that.

[David 132]

Re: So that sums it up really

I'm sure the bot is even now confidently telling people that glass is a slow-moving liquid, and that the Amazonian warriors chopped parts of their anatomies off to facilitate archery.

[Anonymous Coward]

Has this AI bollocks done anything for the consumer ?

The only beneficiaries appear to be the vendors and the people that write about the vendors.

I sense a bubble reaching a critical point. And not in a good way.

Does anyone know if all the "AI" they are pumping into PCs can be repurposed ? Maybe better graphics ?

[Version 1.0]

AI and the Internet

We think that AI is Artificial Intelligence but it's not as smart as Our Intelligence ... that fact is it's all just us not being Intelligent, e.g:

Listen to Bob Marley and the Wailers song "Kinky Reggae" and then wonder just what does Booga Wooga mean in the line "I saw Miss Brown, She had brown sugar, All over her booga wooga" so do google searches and you will see so many stupid explanations, all written by people with absolutely no understanding of the environment in Jamaica ... "Kinky Reggae" is a song written by Bob Marley to make everyone in Jamaica laugh when they see the rest of the world (yes us white idiots) making a totally stupid understanding ...

This was all explained to me when the song came out and I was thinking it was sexual but my Rasta friends (we were toking together every evening and they made me become a reggae and dub lover as a student) explained that Miss Brown was working in the fields harvesting and creating sugar so she was getting brown sugar on her Booga Wooga working shoes ... ever since then I have always loved the song and laughed every time it's played. But any AI or Google search for an explanation only gives you a white stupid explanation - I'm white and I know all the white ideas are stupid because Bob Marley wrote it to make all the Jamaicans laugh.

Feed it to AI and you'll see that Bob Marley is still winning!

[An_Old_Dog]

Waiting for the Music

I'm waiting for the GAN/ML-synthesized song, "The Booga-Wooga Bugle Gal of Company B".

It'll probably be a very 'horny' song.

[Zibob]

Can we maybe not fix it?

Could there be a justification made that people are in control of their own actions and as such are free to do anything stupid suggested to them.

"If your friends jumped off a bridge..."

If the search says to make gasoline infused spaghetti...

That should be on the person that has no sense of self safety. Even chefs will generally taste each ingredient before trusting that the flavour is suitable.

[David 132]

Re: Can we maybe not fix it?

Jumping off a bridge, you say?

[xyz]

I've been summerised and...

I am sorely pissed. The top result on Qwant for me has my website address and a pile of AI generated shite that I can't access or remove but is not what I wrote. It feels like being abused.

[An_Old_Dog]

Summaries

Pre-GAN/ML, you could google something and get junk results such as, "Buy Alan Turing on GoodDeals", with a link to "www.pebbleskyorators.tv"

Now, you're going to get an additional bunch of junk results at the top of your search, with the effective provenance of, "some people wrote something kinda like this -- or, we just made it up."

I don't want a summary. I want hard data, with sources, so I can estimate the writer's/writers' slant(s).

If you want summaries, go subscribe to Reader's Digest. (If they've ceased publication, no problem. You can always find back issues on the tables in American doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms.)

[Stuart Castle]

I've had mixed results using AI. One result springs to mind. I was trying to learn to use the WIX toolkit to build MSIX files (note: This *isn't* the WIX web develeopment toolkit). The toolikit itself uses an ungodly combination of command line options and xml files.. The official documentation is like most other SDK documentation, which means it's essentially a list of the functions available and how to use them.

Nothing to show a total Newbie how to start. Having spent hours with the official documentation trying to create a simple installer (just create a folder, copy a few thousand files to it, then create a shortcut to the main executable, and add a couple of registry keys), and getting no where, despite coming up with a project that *looked* like it should work, I looked for a gui to help generate a project to do what I wanted. I had no intention of using the generated project, just wanted to pick it apart to see how it worked and hopefully learn something.

I find an old GUI, but for the previous version of WIX, which, despite WIX being no longer beng maintained by Microsoft (it was created by them then sold off to an outside company) has, in typical Microsoft style, significant syntax differences with the current toolkit. As such, the generated project files did not work.

So, without thinking, I searched for a tutorial. Forgetting that at work, our default search engine is Bing (yes, I did campaign against this, and I was overruled), so of course, the first result shown was an AI genersted script.. IIRC, it was called "Bing AI" then rather than Copilot. The script did not work, but wierdly, it helped me understand WIX a lot more..

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Google says one key issue with AI Overviews is that it took "nonsensical queries" far too seriously, specifically pointing out that the recommendation to literally eat rocks was only spat out by the search engine because the question was: "How many rocks should I eat?"

Yeah, but this is still an easy question that has a very simple answer: none. The fact that their AI fails a simple test like this suggests the other answers might not be top quality, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

The publicity around "Googles answers" is the other guys better PR, that's all. They all go off the rails at times.

[CowHorseFrog]

A PR department writing bullshit who would have guessed ?

It would be a miracle if they werent writing bullshit.

[aregross]

Supposedly

Whenever I hear someone reference AI I always reply, "You mean SI?"

[Bebu]

"[Reid] denied AI Overviews actually recommended smoking while pregnant, leaving dogs in cars, or jumping off bridges to cure depression,"

Apart from MRDA these suggestions have a logical, if raving bonkers, basis. Smoking does reduce fetal weight (I believe), so a smaller watermelon at term. Leaving dogs in a car make more logical sense than leaving them unrestrained (outside the car.) Jumping off a bridge I am confident you would perk up before hitting the ground or water (not that anyone could say differently.)

Stark raving bonkers.

The common element missing here is a human or moral element not to mention a skerrick of common sense. They are missing from enough humans I am surprised that anyone expects these to be present in a mere artefact.

[User McUser]

[...]these were generally for queries that people don't commonly do[...]

So just a giant "fuck you" if you're not searching for the same thing as everyone else.

Got it, thanks Google.