Michael J. DeLuca: Could everyone stop quoting the “hilarious” wrong answers given by google ai? It wasted a bottle of water to tell you that terrible joke, water is life, ai bullshit is death, what part of this is hard to understand

Could everyone stop quoting the “hilarious” wrong answers given by google ai? It wasted a bottle of water to tell you that terrible joke, water is life, ai bullshit is death, what part of this is hard to understand

I'm as upset as you at the waste but I'd argue that making everyone understand exactly how shit it is is really the only way we'll build enough of a PR problem for them to do stop. Google+ and Reader make it clear that whether people use a service has nothing to do with them continuing to run it!

(I mean: I'm not going to go out of my way to do wasteful AI queries just to find things to make fun of, but if they're floating around I think it's more productive to use them as a vector to criticise the waste than pretend they don't exist and leave more people not-upset with the service.)

I would also guess that at Google’s scale, it‘s not actually submitting prompts to an LLM for each individual search query. More likely it’s generating and caching AI summaries for search topics with the highest anticipated demand.

But I also agree with you: the more normal, mainstream people see the top-tier tech companies exposing AI as an absolute joke, the sooner this bubble bursts.

Same, people need to understand what the hell is going on here. The AI that is being touted as the next revolution by the tech-bros is a scam and only makes people like Sam Altman richer.

And I really recommend listening to Better Offline by @zitron.bsky.social He points out the flaws in what´s going on in the techworld right now concerning AI.

Hopefully! My concern is just that if we were to assume Google were rational about it they wouldn't be doing it at all! We've seen several people claim the implementation was rushed and panicked, and the easiest implementation is also the most wasteful. :/

I don't deliberately use the AI...but every time I google ANYTHING, it has an AI answer as the top listed.

Don’t google anything. Use a less terrible search engine like DuckDuckGo ?

I thought I read DuckDuckGo has started incorporating AI? A friend linked the &udm=14 website earlier, and I started using it.

Oh--yeah, I see that they are. :( Well, at least it is not yet built into the default search like it is with google? I know Ecosia has AI as well, but you have to deliberately go click over to it to use it, so that's what I've got on my phone now

Incredible state about AI and water: bsky.app/profile/torr...

“It pointed to a preprint study – not yet peer-reviewed – from last year by researcher that showed the LLM GPT-3 consumed 500 millilitres of water for every 10 to 50 responses it generates. That is 20 times more than it takes to produce 50 Google searches.” www.scmp.com/news/china/s...

China’s growing data centres and AI could strain scarce water resources: reportwww.scmp.com Hong Kong think tank says annual water use by Chinese data facilities – almost half of which are in dry regions – could more than double by 2030, while AI chatbots ‘drink staggering amounts of water’ ...

I'm a reference librarian and part of our work right now with weeding our collection has involved using search engines to see if some of our older materials are uploaded anywhere online. Right now I'm doing a couple hundred google searches each day and it's frustrating that whether I like it or not,

I'm forced to engage with AI. I can check archive.org and Hathitrust directly, but some of these books aren't there but are in other databases. I have to account for the fact that students who look for X or Y material may just do a google search.

I don't get a say in whether or not EBSCO is going to include an AI search option whenever a user interacts with our catalog. I can tell students that AI is useless or not to trust google results, but they are still going to reach out to me with requests based on that.

All that to say that yes there are people doing silly searches and posting them for clout, but there are also people posting serious questions and getting back AI results and I hope that in those cases they do get posted so that people can see how garbage this stuff is.

I had a long exchange with an EBSCO rep in my capacity as @reckoningmag.bsky.social publisher, trying to convince them AI was unethical/inaccurate, wasteful etc. She seemed receptive but ended up trying to handwave away my concerns. So they will not be carrying Reckoning content, sadly

My "favorite" thing with AI integration is all of the greenwashing. "Actually, we're using environmentally-conscious models!" And then it's just carbon tax credits earned through like. "Awareness campaigns."

Yeah. My partner is a professor, and if her students use AI to cheat, she has to use AI to catch them. It is incredibly frustrating

All of our tools we use to "prove" plagiarism via AI also either use AI or feed their gathered data into some model or other. I'm working on a paper about the ethics of engaging with AI in library sciences because we're really stuck between a rock and a hard place here.

The "AI to catch them" has a super bad accuracy rate, as I understand it. But worth using at all, it just doesn't work. Better to look for different ways of measuring knowledge, probably. At this rate we'll end up totally back at aural exams before too long, huh? =P

I believe what she did was just feed the assignment in as a prompt to see if it would generate the same thing as the student paper, and lo and behold

Ah that's a really interesting approach! I didn't consider that they might just feed the exact prompt without providing any other instructions to the LLM!

Yes. This same thing has been on my mind.

On the other hand, due to the way that AI ruthlessly steals from the entire internet, every time someone does this it reinforces it as the “correct” answer. As ever greater proportions of the internet become infested with this rubbish, the quality will only get worse.

I'm doing my part by removing these services from my tech library, or only running them locally on my machine using models that are no more 'wasteful' than running FFXIV at max settings

We get it, the answers are wrong but thats what generative ai does. At least make your posts funny!

All the ones I've seen are from Google, and I can't turn the damn thing off on mobile 😭

Maybe this will help, it works for me (firefox on mobile user) tedium.co/2024/05/17/g...

How I Made Google’s “Web” View My Default Searchtedium.co Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. You just need one URL parameter.

For Firefox users, someone has now added a plugin to automatically do that for ya

If it’s the same plugin I looked at yesterday, it only hides the ai results using CSS, meaning the same resources still get wasted, you just don’t see the stupidly inaccurate results :(

The tip towards the end of that article worked for me, adding the web-filtered results as a default search engine choice.

But the resources will still get wasted either way unfortunately with Google, at least you won't be lining their pockets with it

I've started intentionally clicking on something underneath the AI shit that was written by an actual human just so they don't feel it's enough to have the garbage/plagiarized AI answer at the top. I hate this!

How? Does the water disappear? Turn into iron? I am sure this started with some teal spec / data, but " it wasted a glass of water" is such a weird, now meaningless, simplification

I'm not going to hunt down the specific reference because you sound like perhaps you're ignorant of the fact that AI consumes a grotesque amount of energy, which takes resources to produce. Which is what you actually need to know. www.forbes.com/sites/arielc...

AI Is Pushing The World Towards An Energy Crisiswww.forbes.com Beyond the many acknowledged concerns, such as AI safety or the future of work and creativity, there is a trade-off that will be no less transformative.

Thank for the link, I will check it out when a get a break. A quick search just find me the echo chamber of everyone repeating that same line.

I'm also unsure whether quoting hilarious answers will be an effective way to mock AI for long, as there is a possibility that they will improve.

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