Google’s generative AI gets “can cats be vegan” right at first….
but THEN decides to throw in a completely wrong opposing opinion, which some people who REALLY want a vegan cat will absolutely cling to.
I do think that this is somewhat deeper than a genAI problem, and a situation where there really is a misinformation campaign on the vegan side and it's not adequately matched by good information. Google's old algorithms would also fail.
You can design a vegan diet for a cat that can meet their health needs, but it's both somewhat complicated & will have some inherent platability challenges, so the question really becomes: What's the point?
Even a vegan like Hannah Shaw, aka The Kitten Lady, is outspoken about cats' need to eat meat. There is zero point except being a self-righteous jerk to trying to get them to eat plants.
"Owners who fed their pet a plant-based diet reported fewer visits to the vet and less medication use"
In other words, nuts who don't feed their cats a suitable diet also don't take them in for proper medical care. Turns out that Christian Scientists report fewer doctor visits too I bet!
“Every time I take Peter Singer to the mean old vet for the diarrhea and weight loss and listlessness, they give me shit like ‘oh he’s starving, look he’s blind now.’ I don’t need that negativity!”
every time i've replicated a stupid google AI response, the SEO problem is right under the surface. "is raw milk good for immunity" gave me a bad answer... summarized from the first search result, a pro-raw-milk site, which i also got with AI turned off
Yeah - like, that's what's kind of strange to me: Google's big AI push does not seem like an attempt to synthesize an enormous pool of training data, it seems like it's just "Generate a summary of the top three results"
yeah, i've found myself just scrolling down to the first link while the AI loads. the "show an excerpt from the first link" response is usually faster and more concise writing
a big part of the problem now though is that the summaries have the implicit imprimatur of Google because they are not only supposed to be fancy, AI-generated answers but they are right there at the top of the results page in the same font as the rest of the official Google stuff.
even people casually attuned to the wisdom that internet search results are unreliable might not immediately grok that Google would make obviously bad information so prominent and official-looking
Five years ago, the top results for this question would have been from Quora and its ilk - chock full of uninformed idiots "answering" questions for clout or whatever; training an LLM on reams of that garbage just cuts out the middleman.
When I panic-rushed my cat to the vet with gasto issues, the first thing the vet asked was if I was feeding her a vegan diet.
This vet literally just lost a patient who's owner tried to do this.
My kitty just had the cat version of stomach flu. She is fine.
Every time I hear people say they're feeding their cats a vegan diet, my instinct is to want to go at them, because they're killing their pets.
I lost a friend once because I just screamed at them for ten straight minutes about how they're abusing their cat by forcing them on a bullshit vegan diet.
Best thing I've done in a while is my switch from Chrome to Vivaldi and locking out the AI part of searches. Seeing misinformation like that every day would break my spirit.
