philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw

Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google's AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived. ...

But two of its defining characteristics come into play when it explains these invented phrases. First is that it’s ultimately a probability machine; while it may seem like a large-language-model-based system has thoughts or even feelings, at a base level it’s simply placing one most-likely word after another, laying the track as the train chugs forward. That makes it very good at coming up with an explanation of what these phrases would mean if they meant anything, which again, they don’t. ...

The other factor is that AI aims to please; research has shown that chatbots often tell people what they want to hear. In this case that means taking you at your word that "you can't lick a badger twice"  is an accepted turn of phrase. In other contexts, it might mean reflecting your own biases back to you, as a team of researchers led by Xiao demonstrated in a study last year. ...

Compounding these issues is that AI is loath to admit that it doesn’t know an answer. When in doubt, it makes stuff up. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-meaning/