As funny as this is, Gemini was essentially broken on release. For context this is a current response
Its fun to laugh at how stupid it was, but the fact its gotten better honestly just increases the risk that someone will believe a hallucination and bad information proliferates because its embedded in largely good information making it appear trustworthy, and if you don’t know the answer then you dont know when it’s confidently wrong, or that AI usage will grow as people decide they think its helpful, with harmful implications for the environment and labor.
It would frankly be nice if had stayed that stupid, it would be much less harmful that way
I still get hilariously bad, wildly inaccurate or false responses from search engine AI.
If the answer isn’t in the training data or easily searchable on the web, it will make shit up and lie to you with the confidence of a used car salesman.
It’s not always this egregious, but it can be. I still see AI messing up the “how many letters are in this word” prompts years after I first discovered that it was a thing.
Yeah, honestly its worse at “how many characters are in this word” kinds of questions than just about anything else. Asking what time it is in other places sometimes yields similar nonsense
And, at the same time, sometimes its able to find things that exist somewhere on the web that I simply cannot find because search engines are a broken disaster. I was looking for short, wide, aquarium stem plants like starugyne repens, but that would be better for a low tech aquarium- low tech plant alternatives to high tech ones feels like a thing that 100% exists somewhere in discussion on the web. Search engines found nothing. ChatGPT found me hygrophila corymbosa ‘compact’. Which is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, but that search engines were just incapable of finding. And honestly thats largely an indictment of search engines. It wouldn’t surprise me if google in part was making a cost benefit analysis on allowing search to be broken since it probably makes people more dependent on ai results.
But thats an easily verifyable thing, where the information exists out there somewhere, and neccisarily I need to look it up to use the information in anyway. I’m more “looking for something” that I know probably exists, than trying to learn something or get information in a conventional sense.
I find its more successful when its organizing existing information around a question that isnt the exact same blog post or article that every relevant source has written because it has optimal SEO and appeals to the widest number of people within that niche (eg: “low tech stem plants” except I’m looking for one with an atypical growth pattern so none of those articles help and google just shows me a million useless pages because theyre almost what I want, and there are millions of them)
On the other hand I went looking for an old quote from a book about antisemitism and it seemed to just keep making shit up and saying it was from other translations of the book, even as I gave it more and more of the actual quote when I found it without ai. Which was quite a while back now, so maybe I need to try that again.
But the more functional it gets the more risk it carries, and the more it can worm its way into people’s lives and reshape social contracts that society has always been built on, while doing lots of environmental harm :/
Yes its my understanding that other models are generally considered much better. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anyone glaze Gemini though. If you’re talking about my comment you’re replying to, I’m not sure I’d agree that saying its now capable of giving a vaguely competent and accurate sounding answer that isnt complete garbage is glazing 😅
Do you see folks aside from google marketing people hyping up Gemini in comparison to other models? (I dont follow things super closely so I may be kinda out of the loop)
Out of curiosity, which do you think produces the most helpful outputs? I care a lot about how technology harms or helps people, and honestly the more capable ai gets the more I’m concerned that without regulatory guard rails its going to do an incredible amount of harm. So I’ve tried to at least keep up with vaguely where its at, but I’ve mostly just used chatGPT, though I’ve tried to limit my usage cause I don’t like the way it feels like it impacts me mentally
Mostly it has seemed better at finding burried information than a search engine, but very unreliable for certain other kinds of tasks. Weirdly it has seemed difficult to predict what kinds of tasks it will perform well, and which it’ll butcher
As funny as this is, Gemini was essentially broken on release. For context this is a current response
Its fun to laugh at how stupid it was, but the fact its gotten better honestly just increases the risk that someone will believe a hallucination and bad information proliferates because its embedded in largely good information making it appear trustworthy, and if you don’t know the answer then you dont know when it’s confidently wrong, or that AI usage will grow as people decide they think its helpful, with harmful implications for the environment and labor.
It would frankly be nice if had stayed that stupid, it would be much less harmful that way
I still get hilariously bad, wildly inaccurate or false responses from search engine AI.
If the answer isn’t in the training data or easily searchable on the web, it will make shit up and lie to you with the confidence of a used car salesman.
It’s not always this egregious, but it can be. I still see AI messing up the “how many letters are in this word” prompts years after I first discovered that it was a thing.
Yeah, honestly its worse at “how many characters are in this word” kinds of questions than just about anything else. Asking what time it is in other places sometimes yields similar nonsense
And, at the same time, sometimes its able to find things that exist somewhere on the web that I simply cannot find because search engines are a broken disaster. I was looking for short, wide, aquarium stem plants like starugyne repens, but that would be better for a low tech aquarium- low tech plant alternatives to high tech ones feels like a thing that 100% exists somewhere in discussion on the web. Search engines found nothing. ChatGPT found me hygrophila corymbosa ‘compact’. Which is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, but that search engines were just incapable of finding. And honestly thats largely an indictment of search engines. It wouldn’t surprise me if google in part was making a cost benefit analysis on allowing search to be broken since it probably makes people more dependent on ai results.
But thats an easily verifyable thing, where the information exists out there somewhere, and neccisarily I need to look it up to use the information in anyway. I’m more “looking for something” that I know probably exists, than trying to learn something or get information in a conventional sense.
I find its more successful when its organizing existing information around a question that isnt the exact same blog post or article that every relevant source has written because it has optimal SEO and appeals to the widest number of people within that niche (eg: “low tech stem plants” except I’m looking for one with an atypical growth pattern so none of those articles help and google just shows me a million useless pages because theyre almost what I want, and there are millions of them)
On the other hand I went looking for an old quote from a book about antisemitism and it seemed to just keep making shit up and saying it was from other translations of the book, even as I gave it more and more of the actual quote when I found it without ai. Which was quite a while back now, so maybe I need to try that again.
But the more functional it gets the more risk it carries, and the more it can worm its way into people’s lives and reshape social contracts that society has always been built on, while doing lots of environmental harm :/
Google models always suck ass, I don’t get why people ever glaze it. Or google in general.
Yes its my understanding that other models are generally considered much better. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anyone glaze Gemini though. If you’re talking about my comment you’re replying to, I’m not sure I’d agree that saying its now capable of giving a vaguely competent and accurate sounding answer that isnt complete garbage is glazing 😅
Do you see folks aside from google marketing people hyping up Gemini in comparison to other models? (I dont follow things super closely so I may be kinda out of the loop)
Gemini is near the bottom of the pack for me personally. It once suggested to me that my gasoline powered lawn mower doesn’t need an oil change 🙄
Out of curiosity, which do you think produces the most helpful outputs? I care a lot about how technology harms or helps people, and honestly the more capable ai gets the more I’m concerned that without regulatory guard rails its going to do an incredible amount of harm. So I’ve tried to at least keep up with vaguely where its at, but I’ve mostly just used chatGPT, though I’ve tried to limit my usage cause I don’t like the way it feels like it impacts me mentally
Mostly it has seemed better at finding burried information than a search engine, but very unreliable for certain other kinds of tasks. Weirdly it has seemed difficult to predict what kinds of tasks it will perform well, and which it’ll butcher
I’ve had the duckduckgo ai (which I have since disabled) relatively recently hallucinate that the walking speed of a game character was like mach 4.5
And it considered that speed “slow+”