HNNewShowAskJobs
Built with Tanstack Start
Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google's Sundar Pichai(bbc.com)
21 points by sebau a day ago | 18 comments
  • jqpabc12319 hours ago

    She also urged Google to take more responsibility over its AI products and their accuracy

    Not really possible when the technology is built around probability.

    It is simply *not* deterministic. The results are based on a roll of the dice. They lack consistency.

    Ask the same question in a slightly different way or at different time and get a different answer. And not just different wording but also different meaning.

    Would you store food in a refrigerator that might *not* keep it from spoiling? Marketing such a product would create a liability issue --- and I expect the same for AI.

    The fact that we're investing $ trillions in such a product will not end well.

  • RealCodingOtaku20 hours ago

    All generative AI output should begin and end with "Trust this output as much as you would trust a 5-year-old to control your life".

  • kloop20 hours ago

    And 4chan has (had? Haven't been there in a while) "only a fool would take the things here as fact"

    Doesn't matter, a good chunk of people are going to take everything at face value

  • endoblast20 hours ago

    It's hard not to trust answers which are superhumanly plausible.

    Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.

    • captain_coffee17 hours ago |parent

      I literally have no idea what you mean

    • tbrownaw20 hours ago |parent

      > superhumanly plausible

      What? Plenty of humans are competent confabulators.

  • AmbroseBierce20 hours ago

    Should I know, I mistakenly trusted Google when it told me there was a live music event last Sunday in a local bar, turns out Google's AI got confused because there is another bar with the same name in a different city here in Colombia, so I dressed up and everything just to go to a bar that was closed that day.

    • kylecazar20 hours ago |parent

      Definitely don't trust the overviews for anything super current. But I suspect you won't anymore :)

  • 20 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • tbrownaw20 hours ago

    > However, some experts say big tech firms such as Google should not be inviting users to fact-check their tools' output, but should focus instead on making their systems more reliable.

    That is a very strange thing to say. They both are and should be doing both.

  • lefty214 hours ago

    If it's untrustworthy, why do they prevent us from disabling "AI overview"?

  • skywhopper20 hours ago

    Completely at odds with everything the company is actually doing. Shameful nonsense.

  • add-sub-mul-div15 hours ago

    If trusting the AI has brought us to this, of what use was the AI?

  • josefritzishere15 hours ago

    You can bioil this down to "Don't trust AI."

  • dmvjs19 hours ago

    should we blindly trust what he says

    • gushie18 hours ago |parent

      Not sure, let me go ask AI

  • powerapple19 hours ago

    ... too late

  • rob_c20 hours ago

    and don't blindly believe a bbc headline these days...