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Posted by jsheard 9/1/2025

Google AI Overview made up an elaborate story about me(bsky.app)
698 points | 278 commentspage 5
idiomat9000 9/1/2025|
But hamas and the plo want no state, they want no land, the hamas guy don't even want to life, they want islamo supremacy over the jews. You can offer all the deals you want, trade land for peace and then get suprise attacked, because the prophet, the perfect man , broke peace contracts for surprise attacks, making contract with believers as valuable as contracts with russians. So if this guy can fanfiction about reality, why can google not fanfic about him?
omer9 9/1/2025||
[flagged]
zozbot234 9/1/2025||
AI makes stuff up, film at 11. It's literally a language model. It's just guessing what word follows another in a text, that's all it does. How's this different from the earlier incidents where that same Google AI would suggest that you should put glue on your pizza or eat rocks as a tasty snack?
simmerup 9/1/2025|||
Because google should be sued for libel when they make shit up about you
anonymars 9/1/2025||
What's your point? That it's okay? That it should be normalized?
zozbot234 9/1/2025||
Maybe if it was normalized, people would no longer trust those "AI overviews" as anything other than silly entertainment.
anonymars 9/1/2025||
I understand what you're saying in principle, but empirically society doesn't seem to be able to do this now even excepting AI hallucinations. So in practical terms, given the society we do have, what to do?
geor9e 9/1/2025||
Can we stop conflating LLM models with the companies that created them? It's "…Gemini made up…". Do we not value accuracy? It'd be a whole different story if a human defamed you, rather than a token predictor.
const_cast 9/1/2025||
LLMs have no sovereignty, identity, or accountability - they are computer programs.

We do not blame computer programs when they have bugs or make mistakes - we blame the human being who made them.

This has always been the case since we have created anything, dating back even tens of thousands of years. You absolutely cannot just unilaterally decide to change that now based on a whim.

geor9e 9/2/2025||
The HN headline I commented on was "Turns out Google made up an elaborate story about me". Someone (admin?) then added "AI Overview". My comment doesn't apply to the current headline. I got what I wanted.
rsynnott 9/2/2025||
The original was perfectly fine. This is Google's _fault_.
rsynnott 9/2/2025|||
"Volkswagen faked emissions tests." "How dare you besmirch the good name of Volkswagen. This evil Volkswagen Passat faked the emissions tests."

Companies are responsible for the bad things they make; the things themselves are, by definition, blameless.

jjj123 9/1/2025||
Why shouldn’t they be conflated? Google made the LLM, it is responsible for the LLMs output.

I mean, no, I don’t think some Google employee tuned the LLM to produce output like this, but it doesn’t matter. They are still responsible.

geor9e 9/2/2025|||
The HN headline I commented on was "Turns out Google made up an elaborate story about me". Someone (admin?) then added "AI Overview". My comment doesn't apply to the current headline. I got what I wanted.
jjj123 9/2/2025||
Yes, and I replied when it was still the original headline. I think they’re both appropriate headlines.
jerf 9/1/2025|
GPT-4 is about 45 gigabytes. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/kiwix/zim/wikipedia/wikipe... , a recent dump of the English wikipedia, is over twice that, and that's just English. Plus AIs are expected to know about other languages, science, who even knows how much Reddit, etc.

There literally isn't room for them to know everything about everyone when they're just asked about random people without consulting sources, and even when consulting sources it's still pretty easy for them to come in with extremely wrong priors. The world is very large.

You have to be very careful about these "on the edge" sorts of queries, it's where the hallucination will be maximized.

binarymax 9/1/2025||
GPT-4 was rumored to be trained on 13 trillion tokens. https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/07/gpt4-details-leaked.html

Not sure where you’re getting the 45Gb number.

Also, Google doesn’t use GPT-4 for summaries. They use a custom version of their Gemini model family.

acoustics 9/1/2025|||
The number of tokens trained on is separate from the model size.

Gemma 3 270M was trained on 6 trillion tokens but can be loaded into a few hundred million bytes of memory.

But yeah GPT-4 is certainly way bigger than 45GB.

jerf 9/2/2025|||
It wouldn't matter if they trained on a quadrillion tokens, or another ten orders of magnitude. There's only so much information you call stuff into a given set of numbers.

But once again I am reminded, never make arguments based on information theory. Nobody understands it.

boudin 9/2/2025||
The issue is that it is not on the edge. It is very much the core feature of those tools, at least how it is currently sold.