Australian users of Bluesky and Mastodon were surprised yesterday to find Bing was informing them that the country they were in didn't actually exist.
  • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
    284·
    1 year ago

    Search engines don’t make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.

    • BreakDecks@lemmy.mlEnglish
      30·
      1 year ago

      I wish search engines “just delivered search results”. Unfortunately, they now directly and confidently answer questions with complete nonsense.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.

        My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.

        • HorseWithNoName@lemm.eeEnglish
          61·
          1 year ago

          Where the info comes from doesn’t exactly change that it’s a problem.

          You can talk about media literacy, but why even have the thing exist if it can’t provide correct answers. That’s its only reason for existing.

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
            33·
            1 year ago

            You seem to be one of the very people I’m complaining about. The point of a search engine absolutely is not to spoon feed you correct answers. It’s to find information on the internet that’s relevant to a topic. There’s lots of wrong information on the internet and it’s not a search engine’s job to decide for you what’s right and what’s wrong.

            • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              Nobody is saying otherwise. The problem being discussed here is that search engines present themselves as “deciding what’s right and wrong” and present themselves as “spoon feeding correct answers”. If we really want to improve media literacy, we can begin by advocating for our search tools to not misrepresent the presentation of their data.

    • Rinox@feddit.itEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, but it’s changing. Search Engines today don’t just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it’s becoming a lot more developed.

      With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it’s not just showing you a list of sources, but it’s answering you directly, making claims, stating “facts” etc. You can easily forget it’s just a search engine, can’t fault people for this.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    This feels just like that situation when gøøgl€ was saying there are no countries beginning with “K” before listening Kenya, except on a continental scale.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      The article isn’t even about AI. This is just default Bing search. The AI actually does know about Australia.

      It’s rather like a wild back how Google search said that there were no French military victories in history. It’s just bad data collection, nothing to do with AI