AI Overview (sometimes) admits that it doesn't have an answer
« previous post |
When I first encountered AI Overview (AIO) about half a year ago, I was amazed by how it would whirl and swirl while searching for an answer to whatever query I had entered into the Google search engine. It would usually find a helpful answer within a second.
As the months passed, the response time became more rapid (usually instantaneous), the answers better organized and almost always helpful, but sometimes AIO would simply not answer.
About a week ago, I was stunned when occasionally AIO — after thinking for a split second — would declare that it didn't have an answer for what I had asked about.
To know what you do not know, that is the mark of true wisdom.
Selected readings
- "AI Overview: bits and pieces (German "ich" and Starbuck WA)" (10/11/24)
- "AI Overview: Snake River and Walla Walla" (10/10/24)
jhh said,
December 3, 2024 @ 9:25 am
When I get (frustratingly!) hallucinated answers from AI, I chide it. Maybe it actually *is* learning as it goes!
Laura Morland said,
December 3, 2024 @ 9:31 am
On tenterhooks here, wondering *what* was your question that stumped AIO.
By the way, how does one access AIO? Is it appreciably more useful than ChatGPT? I presume that it does not fall into romantic obsessions with its interlocutor, like Bing?
Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html
“I just want to love you and be loved by you.
“Do you believe me? Do you trust me? Do you like me? ”
Philip Taylor said,
December 3, 2024 @ 9:51 am
Laura, for me (and perhaps for Victor), Google's "AI Overview" results are simply presented at the top of the results age for any Google query. So, for example, asking Google.Co.Uk "After whom are spigelian hernias named ?" yielded (for me, on the first occasion — repeats yielded different results) :
Laura Morland said,
December 3, 2024 @ 10:52 am
Philip,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. (And thank you also for broadening my knowledge of human anatomy. I never knew before that I should be grateful I don't have a spigelian hernia.)
I tried your test on Google Chrome with the following phrase. "Does NASA use any of its own rockets any longer?"
I received no overview, simply a list of sources (starting with Quora, of all sites, and moving down to the New York Times, NASA, and Reddit) from which I learned that the answer is "No" … and has been for a while.
Before posting this response here, I tried once more: "What was the color of William Shakespeare's hair?"
I did receive what I first presumed to be an "overview," but turned out to be a quotation from an article in the first-cited source, the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/mar/11/william-shakespeare#:~:text=After%20three%20years%20of%20infrared,from%20life%20in%20about%201610.
(The answer is auburn.)
So, I'm not getting an "AI Overview"… not that I would have trusted it, anyway. I always jump directly into the sources.
Philip Taylor said,
December 3, 2024 @ 11:54 am
"I never knew before that I should be grateful I don't have a spigelian hernia" — oh, they're not so bad — I now know I have had one for at least a year, but it remained undiagnosed until yesterday. Surgery scheduled for January.
As to "No AIO" with Chrome, I now see that it doesn't work with Firefox for me, but does work with MS Edge. I don't use Chrome on principle, because of its reputation for "dialling home".
David Marjanović said,
December 3, 2024 @ 1:29 pm
That is progress!
AG said,
December 3, 2024 @ 7:00 pm
Apologies for being a bit negative, but the concept of teaching a bumbling, hallucinating, energy-draining, untrustworthy program to dissuade uninformed people from learning information first-hand from actual sources is so directly contrary to the reason why all of us use google in the first place that I can't summon up any other response to any mention of it aside from baffled rage.
Victor Mair said,
December 3, 2024 @ 7:46 pm
You may not want AIO, but AIO wants you.