Another thought on Google: notice that a key weakness of their algorithm is that it must be giving extra weight to things that have been on the internet and unchanged for a long time. That's why 11 year old reddit comments are bubbling to the top.
I bet something in there is making an evaluation that phrases that have exhibited low churn over a long period must have more truthfulness - and the evidence of this fact is that they haven't been removed or revised over that period.
So not only are is their AI picking troll comments from reddit, but it's weighting things so that the oldest troll comments are the most relevant. And as anyone who was on reddit 11 years ago can tell you, that site was a far more vile hub of degeneracy than it is even now!
Basically, Google AI has been trained in r/jailbait, r/fatpeoplehate and those other cesspits.
Nice work, Google! This won't backfire on you at all!
> There’s something deeply broken about our collective psyches that’s tied into how social media algorithmically promotes doom narratives. Some of these answers are just dead wrong factually [...] Some are absurd - who really thinks TV and cuisine is worse now than it was in the ‘30s? We are absolutely addicted to doom narratives and I have no idea how to shake it.
Doom and pessimism sells more than optimism. It’s more enticing to listen to, it hits you emotionally. A vision of doom is more vivid than one that says “things will keep getting better, gradually.” Also it’s easier for merchants of doom to go around podcasts uttering prophecies than it is for someone to say “progress is possible, you can help, but you need to work a hard for it.”
I live a life very different from most readers, I suspect. I have a job based in history and heritage, and live in a *very* small community (I bet your local high school stadium can easily fit more people than live where I do) in an incredibly remote spot literally 1000 km from anywhere.
I say all these because: the change in google is even cutting through here. People have noticed how bad the search results have gotten, and the AI results debacle is even a topic of conversation. I talked to some folks about Google's AI missteps with image generation (diverse nazis, etc), and mostly people just found it funny, but something has changed even in my local zeitgeist since then. The perception here is that Google was a gold standard of tech quality, and now they're shit.
What do you do as a google executive when it's getting this bad? There's exec panic, and then there's *exec panic*. When you have a golden goose, you want to just ease its way and let it lay lay lay, but Google's batch of idiots just seem hell-bent on killing it. Interesting tactic, and I've got nothing better to do than watch it happen, but what are they thinking?
I'd ask google AI for a hilarious answer but it seems like they turned it off in some places.
It would probably tell me to eat glue and jump off a bridge, I suppose.
>I say all these because: the change in google is even cutting through here. People have noticed how bad the search results have gotten, and the AI results debacle is even a topic of conversation. I talked to some folks about Google's AI missteps with image generation (diverse nazis, etc), and mostly people just found it funny, but something has changed even in my local zeitgeist since then. The perception here is that Google was a gold standard of tech quality, and now they're shit.
This is really interesting - I'd love to hear more about how people in remote locations use the internet. Do you think it's different than people in urban/suburban areas? Do they emphasize different stuff? Do they still join online communities/spaces in the same way?
A friend of mine from law school represented one of the co-defendants in the Takashi 6-9 trial. They showed the jury instagram videos of the defendants loading guns and running up on the victims with their guns pointed. They recorded and posted themselves preparing to rob and robbing people.
Were people even less doomy in the past? Maybe this is just another doom naravtive as well. What if people always believe the present is an exceptionally bad time?
Technically the bad Google results aren't caused by training on Reddit data. The AI is quoting the top search results, so the problem here is mostly the top results are dumb.
It is true the AI should have more "common sense" and know if something is a joke or not, and that could be caused by bad training, but probably the issue is that they made the model too small so it'd be faster and cheaper to run.
Another thought on Google: notice that a key weakness of their algorithm is that it must be giving extra weight to things that have been on the internet and unchanged for a long time. That's why 11 year old reddit comments are bubbling to the top.
I bet something in there is making an evaluation that phrases that have exhibited low churn over a long period must have more truthfulness - and the evidence of this fact is that they haven't been removed or revised over that period.
So not only are is their AI picking troll comments from reddit, but it's weighting things so that the oldest troll comments are the most relevant. And as anyone who was on reddit 11 years ago can tell you, that site was a far more vile hub of degeneracy than it is even now!
Basically, Google AI has been trained in r/jailbait, r/fatpeoplehate and those other cesspits.
Nice work, Google! This won't backfire on you at all!
> There’s something deeply broken about our collective psyches that’s tied into how social media algorithmically promotes doom narratives. Some of these answers are just dead wrong factually [...] Some are absurd - who really thinks TV and cuisine is worse now than it was in the ‘30s? We are absolutely addicted to doom narratives and I have no idea how to shake it.
Doom and pessimism sells more than optimism. It’s more enticing to listen to, it hits you emotionally. A vision of doom is more vivid than one that says “things will keep getting better, gradually.” Also it’s easier for merchants of doom to go around podcasts uttering prophecies than it is for someone to say “progress is possible, you can help, but you need to work a hard for it.”
Brilliant twitter thread!
I live a life very different from most readers, I suspect. I have a job based in history and heritage, and live in a *very* small community (I bet your local high school stadium can easily fit more people than live where I do) in an incredibly remote spot literally 1000 km from anywhere.
I say all these because: the change in google is even cutting through here. People have noticed how bad the search results have gotten, and the AI results debacle is even a topic of conversation. I talked to some folks about Google's AI missteps with image generation (diverse nazis, etc), and mostly people just found it funny, but something has changed even in my local zeitgeist since then. The perception here is that Google was a gold standard of tech quality, and now they're shit.
What do you do as a google executive when it's getting this bad? There's exec panic, and then there's *exec panic*. When you have a golden goose, you want to just ease its way and let it lay lay lay, but Google's batch of idiots just seem hell-bent on killing it. Interesting tactic, and I've got nothing better to do than watch it happen, but what are they thinking?
I'd ask google AI for a hilarious answer but it seems like they turned it off in some places.
It would probably tell me to eat glue and jump off a bridge, I suppose.
>I say all these because: the change in google is even cutting through here. People have noticed how bad the search results have gotten, and the AI results debacle is even a topic of conversation. I talked to some folks about Google's AI missteps with image generation (diverse nazis, etc), and mostly people just found it funny, but something has changed even in my local zeitgeist since then. The perception here is that Google was a gold standard of tech quality, and now they're shit.
This is really interesting - I'd love to hear more about how people in remote locations use the internet. Do you think it's different than people in urban/suburban areas? Do they emphasize different stuff? Do they still join online communities/spaces in the same way?
A friend of mine from law school represented one of the co-defendants in the Takashi 6-9 trial. They showed the jury instagram videos of the defendants loading guns and running up on the victims with their guns pointed. They recorded and posted themselves preparing to rob and robbing people.
Were people even less doomy in the past? Maybe this is just another doom naravtive as well. What if people always believe the present is an exceptionally bad time?
> broke the Twitch record for most concurrent viewers with more than 380,000.
That can't be true. There have been multiple streams with over 1 million viewers.
Hmm, I might have gotten the metric wrong - I know they broke some kind of record?
Technically the bad Google results aren't caused by training on Reddit data. The AI is quoting the top search results, so the problem here is mostly the top results are dumb.
It is true the AI should have more "common sense" and know if something is a joke or not, and that could be caused by bad training, but probably the issue is that they made the model too small so it'd be faster and cheaper to run.