Google's AI enables scammers.

it's seo games all over again

and the former kings of tuning the algorithms to favor seo that bubbled useful info up harder have thrown it all out in the name of impressing everyone with how space age and sci fi their tech is. it's not about advancing science or even pushing a useful product. it's strictly a tool for scams. is it a surprise that scammers are gaming the google scam better than anyone else? not really. they've always had a step up compared to the average internet denizen thanks to practice. this is why i get so frustrated when people dismiss ai skepticism as being a product of luddites.
you're getting scammed to think ai will benefit you
systems built by scammers will always benefit scammers
the luddites were right. scientific advancements should benefit the workers, not the rich
I mean, this isn't specifically an AI issue, this is scammers updating the info in Google business listings because the airlines don't actually care to maintain those pages (and Google doesn't want actual humans doing any work to make sure their shit is accurate). This has been going on before AI, AI is just following the garbage in, garbage out model that everyone said was going to be the result of this push.
A-I-S-E-O
- 🎶 Old McDonald had a server farm... 🎶

This is why "AI" should be avoided at all cost. It's all bullshit. Any tool that "hallucinates" - I. E. Is error strewn - is not fit for purpose. Gaming the AI is just the latest example of the crap being spewed by these systems.

The underlying technology has its uses but its niche and focused applications, nowhere near as capable or as ready as the hype.

We don't use Wikipedia as a primary source because it has to be fact checked. AI isn't anywhere as near accurate as Wikipedia.so why use it?

The underlying technology has its uses
Yes indeed agreed.
Sometimes BS is exactly what I need! Like, hallucinated brainstorm suggestions can work for some workflows and be safe when one is careful to discard or correct them. Copying a comment I made a week ago:
I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.
Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.
In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.
- https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/
  A good read about ai summarizing.
Because some are lazy fucks
Gotta tell you, you made a fairly extreme pronouncement against a very general term / idea with this:
"AI" should be avoided at all cost
Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? It sounds, to me, like this - "Vague idea I poorly understand ('AI') should be 'avoided' (???) with disregard for any negative consequences, without considering them at all"
Cool take you've got?
Edit to add: whoops! Just realized the community I'm in. Carry on, didn't mean to come to the precise wrong place to make this argument lol.
- Listen, I know that the term "AI" has been, historically, used to describe so many things to the point of having no meaning, but I think, given the context, it is pretty obvious what AI they are referring to.

Wait until you hear about the AI's programming abilities!

It "knows" that a Python program starts with some lines like: from (meaningless package name) include

If you can register the package name it invents, your code could be running on some of the world's biggest companies' internal servers!

AI was launched with the promise of taking away the boring parts and letting us focus on the fun stuff.

In reality it takes away the fun stuff and gives us more boring things to do.

Being scammed isn't boring. It is blood boiling and (wrongly) shame-filled.
But yeah, you are right. The boring and the bad.
- Oh I agree with you there, I was talking about AI as a concept and how it was sold to us.

AI results are always so bad. I don't like that there is AI medical results. That needs more pushback.

Ironically, that is possibly one of the few legit uses.
Doctors can't learn about every obscure condition and illness. This means they can miss the symptoms of them for a long time. An AI that can check for potential matches to the symptoms involved could be extremely useful.
The provisio is that it is NOT a replacement for a doctor. It's a supplement that they can be trained to make efficient use of.
- Couldn't that just as easily be solved with a database of illnesses which can be filtered by symptoms?

and that's why I always go straight to the company website to find that info instead of googling it

I google for the company website (e.g. Wikipedia) and then I google with the site in mind for info. Works well

Yet again tech companies are here to ruin the day. LLM are such a neat little language processing tool. It's amazing for reverse looking up definitions (where you know the concept but can't remember some dumb name) or when looking for starting points or want to process your ideas and get additional things to look at, but most definitely not a finished product of any kind. Fuck tech companies for selling it as a search engine replacement!

It is great at search. See this awesome example I hit just today from Google's AI overview:
Housing prices in the United States dropped significantly between 2007 and 2020 due to the housing bubble and the Great Recession:
2007: The median sales price for a home in the first quarter of 2007 was $257,400. The average price of a new home in September 2007 was $240,300.
2020: The average sales price for a new home in 2020 was $391,900.
See, without AI I would have thought housing prices went up between 2007, and that $391,900 was a bigger number than $257,400.

That's why you always get it from their website. Never trust a LLM to do a search engine's job.

Respectfully, this is victim blaming. Criticize Google, not end users.
- Wait, are you advocating people blindly trust unreliable sources and then get angry at the unreliable source when it turns out to be unreliable rather than learn from shit like this to avoid becoming a victim?
- Remember when 4chan got people to microwave their phones because they got them to believe it would charge it?
  If calling those people stupid is victim blaming then so be it. I’m blaming the victim.
  This case isn’t as clear as that but even before the AI mania the instant answer at the top of Google results was frequently incorrect. Being able to discern BS from real results has always been necessary and AI doesn’t change that.
  I’ve been using Kagi this year and it keeps LLM results out of the way unless I want them. When you open their AI assistant it says
  Assistant can make mistakes. Think for yourself when using it.
  I think that sums it up nicely.

Would that make Google liable? I mean that wouldn't be a case of users posting information that would be a case of Google posting information in that case wouldn't it? So it seems to me they'd be legally liable at that point.

Ah but Google is a giant company and as is U.S. law doesn't have to fave consequences for anything
In a sane world? Yes.
I think there's a disclaimer with all AI summaries. Although, I just tried googling United airlines and there is no longer an AI summary, only a message directly from their website.
Yes, so, no.

That is literally the worst use case for AIs. There's no way they should be letting it provide contact info like that.

Also they're stupid for dialing a random number.

They gave up working search with algorithms that are easier to reason about and correct for with a messy neural network that is broken in so many ways and basically impossible to generally correct while retaining its core characteristics. A change with this many regressions should've never been pushed to production.

Honestly I wanted to write a snug comment about "But but it even says AI can sometimes make mistakes!", but after clicking through multiple links and disclaimers I can't find Google actually admitting that

Same happened to my wife. She gave them enough info that they threatened to call and cancel her flight unless she paid them. Never did cancel it

Google has been sponsoring scammers as first search results since its creation. Google has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to people, and need to be sued for it.

This has been an issue since long before LLMs. Before the AI summary box, scammers used targeted ads to place ahead of the actual company you were searching for.

Yeah, but that was easy to spot, both by people and by Google. There were at least some guardrails, imperfect, not ideal, but they existed. With llm there is basically none

Yep, that's Imitation Intelligence for ya.

Drag is making sure to eat one rock per day and put glue in pizza just like the Google AI says!

I'm sorry but this has been a thing long before "AI" based results. Scammers always used tricks to end up at the top of search results.

Scammers have been a thing long before writing. That doesn't mean people shouldn't be made aware of new ways to be scammed.
- That's what I'm saying though, it isn't a new way.
At the top, but that isn't what this post is saying. This is saying that Google's AI gave the scammer answer. Not that they provided a link you could click on, but that Google itself said this is the number.
- It's not an AI, it's just word prediction, which also just follows stupid algorithms, just like those who determine search results. Both can be tricked / manipulated if you understand how they work. It's still the same principle for both cases.

I get paranoid enough about making sure I'm clicking the correct search result and not some scam. I hope I would avoid any AI answers but yeah, to many people it could be confusing.

Having worked with AI and AI products in my last job before I was let go I can say this:

Out of the box AI is very good at the following:

Mundane very simple binary/boolean tasks. Is this a yes/no. Can I find a piece of information that I was told is here based on your statement? Etc
Condensing very complex processes into very simplistic things - NOTE you will lose a lot of information based on this action unless you refine a statement.
Making overarching summaries - kinda similar to 2 but also its own thing, think more creating a summary of a book.

Programmed AI - read machine learning, because you are still telling it how to interpret things - can be good at (depending how good you are at telling it what it should do):

Interpreting meaning in a statement.
Understanding if - then constructs.
Deducing plausible outcomes.

ALL AI struggles at:

Interpreting real vs fake (thats why you literally teach it how to understand what a spot light is with your captcha)
Understanding complexity in speech and tonal differences - I am SO happy to be here /s
Thinking on its own - using collected data to make an inference that it was not directly programmed to understand

The big craze over AI totally was misunderstood. AI is best to be thought of as Automated Intelligence and the word Artificial at its current state is a complete misnomer.

This is just one example of people having been mislead by the name to not fully understand what is up with AI.

Scroll past the Imitation Intelligence summary to the actual links.

In all fairness, the phone number the AI response gave was most likely dreamt up by the AI and probably happened to be a scammer's number.

Well, I have considered it.

Well, stop it?

I mean, you are using an LLM for search, so that was bound to happen.

Use something like Perplexity.ai for search always gives me great results with links so you can find out where the AI got their info from.

This isn't a problem with AI, but a user problem.

Google literally puts AI "search" at the top of its page and you expect everyone to just ignore that?
- I'm not justifying Googles grift.
  All I'm saying is that an LLM is only decent at generating text. Everything else it sucks at. So it isn't logical to use it as a search engine. Google is also to blame for that. They are slapping AI to whatever they have running. Like most tech companies these days.
  Compare that to Perplexity, which is a search engine first and only uses an LLM to make a summary of websites that are riddled with SEO. And then add a link so you can check for yourself if the LLM is hallucinating or not.
  Don't be like a Techbro conflating LLMs and General AI. They are different things. And the sooner all users understand this the better.
Blaming the victim for late-stage capitalism's grifts isn't the own you think it is.
- Google is also a user of these LLM technology. They understand as much of em as the average techbro.
  That is why they are switching their search engine to an LLM like the morons they are.

their first mistake was using united airlines. or airlines period. fuck flying

edit: LOL i actually love how people take personal offense every time i say "fuck flying"

so, just so we're all clear: fuck flying

How do you propose crossing oceans in a timely manner?
- this is always the question. and the answer is if i can't get there in time by not flying, then so sorry, i won't be able to attend. i don't fly, because fuck literally everything involved with flying. which apparently now also includes bogus customer service phone numbers