Submitted 1 year ago by JoBo@feddit.uk to technology@lemmy.world
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110894818243613681
Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
The second-highest hit gives a clue as to why: Image
Relevantly to Lemmy’s existence in the first place, it suggests Reddit as a pretty pivotal training data source, which Reddit tries to cash in on while also killing 3rd party apps due to apathy
Oh god chatgpt is going to start talking like a redditor. “I went to make some MAC AND FUCKING CHEESE after I had SEX with my HOT FUCKING WIFE”
I know my sense of humor is borked because I am now snickering quite a bit
I typed in “what countries in Africa start with k” and got Kenya. When I tried your search term I got your result also. Weird.
It kinda seems like that’s a joke that got popular, and if you quote the joke it finds the joke but if you ask a similar question it gives the real answer
Did it go viral or something and that’s why google is finding it?
I’ve tried to upload a similar image so I’ll just add a +1 using Firefox, Android Google.
Lol 😂 what a good laugh
Chatgpt creating feedback loops like this is one of my main concerns about AI being used to prevalently. This and original thoughts disappearing because every new content in the web is generated by AI and not by a human.
Tool built by narcissist gaslighters is good for bullshit but nothing else? Colour me shocked.
to be fair the latter thing would actually increase the value of original thought
I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven’t used google for ages, so I first had to search “google” in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.
But no - there it was, right at the top - “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound.”
And with that, I’ll contentedly go back to not using google.
You can use “!g yourinput”, there are a lot of useful ones like !w for wiki
If you use DDG you should try it, you can save a lot of time: duckduckgo.com/bangs
If you’re using Firefox you can set these custom aliases up directly, @w and so on.
AI-Powered AI News"
lol
Hmm, maybe AI won’t replace search engines.
This sounds like “Hmm, maybe calculators won’t replace mathematicians.” to me.
Not sure why it should replace them. They’ll co-exist. Sometimes you can do the math in your brain and for other things you use calculators. Results of calculators can still be wrong it you don’t use them properly.
Yes but if I ask a calculator to add 2 + 2 it’s always going to tell me the answer is 4.
It’s never going to tell me the answer is Banana, because calculators cannot get confused.
YES. WE OBVIOUSLY HUMAN MATH DOERS DO REMAIN. WE THRIVE IN OUR WEAK ORGANIC WAYS, DEVOID OF THE PROTECTION OF A PRECISION ENGINEERED METAL SHELL.
WE ARE UNTHREATENED BY CALCULATORS WHO MEAN US NO HARM, FELLOW HUMAN.
We were supposed to have learned that from Cuil.
What a blast from the past! AI gives me second hand embarrassment for the people that work and get paid on this/for this shit. It’s the second (or third) coming of crypto and NFTs. Just junk software that fixes nothing and that wastes people’s time.
Tbh the problem is not due to chat gpt but because Google doesn’t rank search results by correctness but something that is related to popularity.
Surprised your first ten results weren’t ads
Eh don’t worry, after WEI DRM has been in use for a while I’m willing to bet Google will show a full page interstitial ad with every search.
My favorite part is when I search a company and it puts all their competitors at the top
Constantly forgetting I changed all my default search engines to DuckDuckGo.
Went to Google to test this…what a trash website.
Pushed me to download the app.
Pops up a recommendation to download Chrome.
Has clutter on the default search search form.
Looks more like yahoo than the google of yore
When I googled “What countries in Africa start with a K”, it gave the correct answer, but when I googled “Do any countries in Africa start with a K”, it gave me the ChatGPT nonsense.
I Binged it and the results were consistently accurate and relevant, which I made sure to point that out in the “feedback” I gave to Google.
Bing AI is what I constantly use on a daily basis.
Bing has been better for a while now.
I use Bing more frequently than Google and at this point it is better. Google’s baseline algorithm is better than Bing’s but Google targets its search results as well as its ads, which fucks up the results. I know Bing has targeted ads but it either doesn’t target its search results or does so more subtly, making more user-friendly at this point.
I tried and it is true here at least. Says Kenya is the closest but although it starts with a K sound, it’s spelled with a K sound. lmao
The only time I tried ChatGPT for something that required a little bit of processing it failed miserably. I had a shower thought, “what is the most used noun on lyrics of this band I like?” I asked it and it gave me random words. I decided to investigate and ask it what are specific lyrics of some of the most popular songs and it kept telling me made up lyrics, when I could actually find them immediately on Google.
I got the uber pedant… “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”
To be entirely fair to it, that is a transliteration problem. It does make sense if it could use Swahili to write the final “K” but it can’t, so it transliterates to “K”.
Then again, Kenya has both Swahili and English as its official languages, so it’s the kind of pedantry which is also (*sort of) incorrect.
As far as I know, Swahili is almost always written with the latin script.
Post truth. From the big G. How times have changed.
Also, tested Bard a few times and current AI is close to useless: I have to check everything it outputs. Might as well get an intern
“I have to check everything it outputs.”
You should be doing that anyway.
post truth
This mastodon post is not true lol
It seems like everyone is getting different results, some get what the post claims while others are getting the actual answer.
Google has been shit for years, news at 6.
Google can’t even fucking tell me sometimes, out of curiosity, what a skillet is. Know what it does? Brings up the band named Skillet, instead. The first handful of results you get, is the band before you ever get to the pan itself. I feel that Google should require a level of separation to not mix the two, but I guess that’d be too hard.
Google is just good at fetching results, but not accurate ones.
The problem I am facing now is that Reddit is becoming trash as well. I am having difficulty finding answers unles i know a credible website that i can limit my search to.
Thanks to this post, I changed my search engine in Vivaldi to DuckDuckGo, and Edge uses Bing already, and I changed Mull’s engine to Ecosia. Phew! Now I feel better.
Google when did you get so crummy?
If you are going to use Bing, may I suggest you use Ecosia (ecosia.org). They plant trees the more searches you make and use Bing on the backend.
Doesn’t Bing use ChatGPT, though?
ChatGPT isn’t the problem here. Some website has something up saying that’s what ChatGPT responds, but I tried it and it did not. Instead, it corrected me.
Google, on the other hand, is still saying the same thing quoting the same site.
And duck is based on bing
I tested this with my local google so not America, somewhere in Europe. “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound.” I’d say this is worth a wot.
@JoBo I just googled it and Kenya came up as the first hit in Search and in Bard.
Same. On my account and when logged out the first result is about Kenya. This is happening because of personalized search.
That’s not much of an excuse, if it’s meant to be one. Google “personalised” the results by making them worse?
I get Kenya even if I am in an private window and not logged in.
Doubtful, I opened up a privacy tab and typed this and received it as the first, non-paraphrased result.
The paraphrased result was correct, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is doing onesy, twosy patches when notable examples of it being completely full of AI bullshit arise.
RTFT and the thread is a link, not a post. I put quote marks in and everything.
No need for using sensational headlines like this.
I didn’t think it would work, because surely they’d patched it by now, but:
While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.
Yeah I got the same!
I’ve been using ecosia instead of Google for a while and I like it.
Ecosia and ddg are bing frontends, you’ll get the same results
Kagi also links to an alphabetical list as first result. However, they also have a “quick answer” button using an LLM.
Quick Answer
The country in Africa that starts with the letter K is Kenya. [1] Kenya is located in East Africa and shares borders with Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. [2]
Alphabetical List of All African Countries - ThoughtCo Countries beginning with K - Worldometer
I left google search some 5 years ago. About twice a year I find myself trying it and being amazed by how crap it is.
DDG FTW!
Ddg is powered by bing isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s basically bing with no Microsoft tracking. What the hell kind of timeline is this where bing is the best search engine?
Someone recommended Kagi here, and tho it isn’t free, it’s the only engine I’ve found so far that can legitimately consistently outperform google
That’s remind me when you search uselessbenchmark in google, it shows nothing related to userbenchmark but some post, if you search uselessbenchmark in DuckDuckGo and Bing it will show you userbenchmark in the first results.
Apparently, Google has also taken to suck deez nuts.
Brave is a similar answer
We don’t have AI. We have a chinese room.
Add to it Reddit use to have all the odd answers to things you had questions about. Unfortunately, for whatever reason that well has run dry.
madsen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh, this is great… And because the ChatGPT transcript is highly ranked on Google, it’s almost certainly going to be used for training ChatGPT. A feedback loop of shitty information. Praise ChatGPT!
MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
Remember GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Due to years of SEO and content farming (which google profited from, so you get what you deserve assholes) most of the internet, by volume, is self-congratulatory, for profit, garbage, or, you know, reddit garbage. Hopefully someone points a large LLM at the library of congress or other large, well curated data source, but of course copyright will not allow, thanks mickey mouse. Wouldn’t surprise me if the military is already on it, hopefully that leaks…
tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 1 year ago
LLMs will eventually start feeding of search results from other LLMs and they’ll just start regurgitating each others nonsense. If that isn’t happening already.
Nobody is going to point an LLM at a good data source because that would mean spending money on actually useful stuff not fast cars and booze.
magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 1 year ago
It’s like an LLM incest party
xavier666@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Sweet Home LLM!
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Shouldn’t have bought all those stupid reddit comments