←back to thread

Google AI Overview made up an elaborate story about me

(bsky.app)
693 points jsheard | 2 comments | 01 Sep 25 14:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.516s | source
Show context
slightwinder ◴[01 Sep 25 15:09 UTC] No.45093284[source]▶
Searching for "benn jordan isreal", the first result for me is a video[0] from a different creator, with the exact same title and date. There is no mentioning of "benn" in the video, but some mentioning of jordan (the country). So maybe, this was enough for Google to hallucinate some connection. Highly concerning!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgUzVZiint0

replies(3): >>45093342 #>>45093749 #>>45095962 #
trjordan ◴[01 Sep 25 15:53 UTC] No.45093749[source]▶
This is almost certainly what happened. Google's AI answers aren't magic -- they're just summarizing across searches. In this case, "Israel" + "Jordan" pulled back a video with opposite views than the author.

It's somewhat less obvious to debug, because it'll pull more context than Google wants to show in the UI. You can see this happening in AI mode, where it'll fire half a dozen searches and aggregate snippets of 100+ sites before writing its summary.

replies(3): >>45094262 #>>45094296 #>>45095306 #
underdeserver ◴[01 Sep 25 16:40 UTC] No.45094262[source]▶
Ironic, that Google enshittifying their search results is hurting what they hope is their next cash cow, AI.
replies(1): >>45094767 #
1. gumby271 ◴[01 Sep 25 17:32 UTC] No.45094767[source]▶
I honestly don't know if people even care that the search result summaries are completely wrong the majority of the time. Most people I know see an answer given by Google and just believe it. To them that's the value, the accuracy doesn't really matter. I hope it ends up killing Google, but for the majority the shitty summary has replaced even shittier search results. On the surface it's a huge improvement, even if it's just distilled garbage.
replies(1): >>45095830 #
2. larodi ◴[01 Sep 25 19:30 UTC] No.45095830[source]▶
there was a joke like 15 years ago

in googlis non est, ergo non est

which sums very well how people are super biased to believe the search results.