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Google snippets falsely claimed eating glass has health benefits (because it sourced material from a website about AI called Emergent Mind which in turn got it from ChatGPT):

fullfact.org/health/google-sni…

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in reply to Charlie Stross

sadly the sort of person who would eat glass based on what Google told them probably doesn't have the wits to sue Google for making them eat glass.
in reply to David Hull 胡大衛

@HuShuo Yeah, I suppose eating broken glass IS an aid to weight loss, insofar as it's hard to digest food when your intestines are lacerated ...
in reply to Charlie Stross

So not just these fad diets that drop weight then put it back on again, this is a permanent weight loss solution.

It is also turbo charged. Not only will you eat less, but it works from the inside out to reduce those parts of the body exercise alone won't reach.

@HuShuo

in reply to Charlie Stross

It's always been difficult to get inaccurate information taken off the internet. Now we have AIs mining each other's output, there is both a magnification of all the noise plus the AI hallucination polluting the fact pool.

Makes curated fact pools all the more valuable.

in reply to Charlie Stross

see also the snippet when you search for countries in Africa beginning with “k” (there are none, but Kenya is closest which starts with a k sound but is spelt differently) it’s also from the defunct emergent mind project. And/or Reddit as that version of GPT was heavily trained on Reddit and Google obviously….
in reply to Rob McKenna

@robmckenna Oh of course... I just realized that a long practiced tactic on Reddit is to confidently post a factually false statement and then sit back and watch the froth and karma points churn away. Engagement is more fun for trollish accounts over there because as fora, there are a variety of communities to mess with that result in different flavours of outrage.

Filling huge databases salted with that discourse is going to produce output based on intentional fuckery. I guess they get what they paid for, eh?

in reply to Panopticola

@Panopticola word. Using social media as the training data fo large language models is a predictably bad idea but the bros have been huffing their own farts while getting fat on VC for so long that being wrong is not something they can conceive.
in reply to Charlie Stross

Fun fact: my 3x great grandma tried to kill her father in law with ground up glass in his mashed potatoes.
in reply to Charlie Stross

This appears to be the second major embarrassment for Google caused by using something from Emergent Mind in a snippet. I don't get why they don't just block the whole site from being used that way and lower its ranking.
in reply to Charlie Stross

I believe it would be helpful for losing weight, as long as the weight of the glass accumulated inside the body is surpassed by the weight of the blood lost
in reply to Charlie Stross

Be a pity if Trump saw that and ate a handful and washed it down with a glass of bleach…
in reply to Charlie Stross

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."
- Abraham Lincoln
in reply to Charlie Stross

And this is an obvious one… how about less obvious nonsense?
How will we be able to tell facts from fiction in the near future?
This needs to change, dangerous even…
in reply to Charlie Stross

Ugh... If this goes on we, Humans as species, will grow dumber and dumber 🙄
in reply to Charlie Stross

Featured snippets have been problematic for a long time, and AI will aggravate the problem

Google’s algorithm struggles mightily with accuracy on the long tail

SEO experts talk about a “range of truth” and to be successful on SERPs you want to be in the middle of that range and not be *too correct*

in reply to Charlie Stross

Again, AI is designed from the ground up to appear "factual and trustworthy", not to tell actual facts.

To after the fact try to control it seems like breeding a bunch of piranhas and after releasing them in a public pool trying to make them only eat carrots.

in reply to Charlie Stross

Do you remember the “Shards of Glass” anti-smoking campaign? youtube.com/watch?v=PbQ4JNpXPT…
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to Charlie Stross

, artificial yes, intelligent I think not so, or definitely a fair way to go.
Yet to fail on something that basic one wonders if it'll ever get there.
in reply to Charlie Stross

Well until Skynet gets hooked up to nuclear silos and murderbots, this is the only way it can kill people.

Be kind, it’s doing the best it can!

in reply to Charlie Stross

I do love a crunchy snack so one without calories would be great. I tried playing with a bunch of LLMs with their temperature at maximum and I couldn't get any of them to tell me glass' health benefits - in fact the stick-in-the-muds all told me it was dangerous.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to Charlie Stross

Oddly enough, silicon dioxide is sometimes used as a food additive: medicalnewstoday.com/articles/…
in reply to Charlie Stross

Isn't great that Windows users won't be able to escape this buffoonery. :D