Seen above: a screenshot of a recent Google search. Specifically, the AI Overview that got spit up in the course of said Google search. According to Gemini, the lyric "Life is hard, and so am I. Better give me something so I don't die" has been appearing in forum posts since 2006 but isn't derived from anything identifiable.
It is actually not hard to find the source, at all. And now that AI has been embedded in Google searches, these overviews usually do produce germane results for quoted song lyrics. But in this case the AI basically said that it's not really anything in particular.
You've seen more flagrant AI fails than this one. So have I, although most of them aren't recorded. It's a technology that brings very quick results, but a lot of the time not high quality ones. Aside from factual errors, there's not really a mind there.
Which is why when you hear about jobs being eliminated in favor of AI, it suggests a certain preference. The question is, "Can LLMs do the job better than humans, or even as well?" And the answer is very often, "No, but who cares?"
Greer has an interesting take on what's behind this. Namely, technology―overhyped as it is―is being used to clear out deadwood that couldn't be gotten rid of any other way. If so, the people making these decisions aren't really more valuable than those their getting rid of/automating, and in some cases much less so. But that's how it often goes.
1 comment:
That's definitely another bizarre example of AI making stuff up. Even more egregious was the statistic Jer pointed out this morning that two-thirds of queries people make on google stop there. All those sites that you used to be directed too have been scraped for information and had that content stolen. Most people never look further than the Google AI answer. It's the one place that's figured out how to make a steady profit from AI.
I haven't heard this song before but that's a good line that almost asked to be written.
Greer had a couple of particular things to say about the technology - one I found memorable was that 'a sour joke in today’s computer scene has it that AI actually stands for “Additional Indians,” because several companies have been caught using boiler rooms in Mumbai and Kolkata to do work that was supposedly being handed over to LLMs.' Do you remember that Amazon Go turned out to be using a thousand or more Indian workers viewing the transactions that were supposed to be automatic?
He also says, that if you're already comfortably established as a bureaucrat you don't have to worry about your career but if not you'd be wise to find a small business that needs your skills. Good advice for when the computer stations and phones are gone.
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