Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.
I… don’t even. I lack the words.
While the individuals have a responsibility to double check things, I think Google is a big part of this. They’re rolling “AI” into their search engine, so people are being fed made up, inaccurate bullshit by a search engine that they’ve trusted for decades.
That’s not what they’re talking about here. Unless this so different in the US, only Microsoft so far shows LLM “answer” next to search results.
Google may not be showing an “AI” tagged answer, but they’re using AI to automatically generate web pages with information collated from outside sources to keep you on Google instead of citing and directing you to the actual sources of the information they’re using.
Here’s an example. I’m on a laptop with a 1080p screen. I went to Google (which I basically never use, so it shouldn’t be biased for or against me) and did a search for “best game of 2023”. I got no actual results in the entire first screen. Instead, their AI or other machine learning algorithms collated information from other people and built a little chart for me right there on the search page and stuck some YouTube (also Google) links below that, so if you want to read an article you have to scroll down past all the Google generated fluff.
I performed the exact same search with DuckDuckGo, and here’s what I got.
And that’s not to mention all the “news” sites that have straight up fired their human writers and replaced them with AI whose sole job is to just generate word salads on the fly to keep people engaged and scrolling past ads, accuracy be damned.
I mean I kind of see your point but calling those results AI is not accurate unless you’re just calling any kind of data collation/wrangling or even just basic programming logic “AI”. What Google is doing is taking the number of times a game is mentioned in the pages that are in the gaming category and trying to spoon feed you what it thinks you want. But that isn’t AI. the point of the person you were replying to is that it wasn’t as if he had intended to perform a Google search and was misled, you have to go to Google bard or chatgpt or whatever and prompt it, meaning it’s on you if you’re a professional who’s going to cite unverified word salad. The YouTube stuff is pretty obvious, it’s a part of their platform. What was done has nothing to do with web searches.
It was kinda funny to me when everyone freaked out about misinformation and “death of search” when I see a lot of people already never leave Google and treat Instant Answers as the truth, like they do with Chat-GPT, despite being very innacurate and out of context a lot of times.
And this is the guy they want testifying about 45?
‘my honor, I object on the grounds that the prosecution witness is incompetent’.
The problem is breathless AI news stories have made people misunderstand LLMs. The capabilities tend to get a lot of attention, but not so much for the limitations.
And one important limitation of LLM’s: they’re really bad at being exactly right, while being really good at looking right. So if you ask it to do an arithmetic problem you can’t do in your head, it’ll give you an answer that looks right. But if you check it with a calculator, you find the only thing right about the answer is how it sounds.
So if you use it to find cases, it’s gonna be really good at finding cases that look exactly like what you need. The only problem is, they’re not exactly what you need, because they’re not real cases.
I’m genuinely amazed at the calibre of people running the US. More so that aparently half the nation thinks its the best choice.
I’m not.
We’ve seen little other than the loss of economic and social liberty in the last 40 years.
99% of voters still choose the same two parties in charge of it like clockwork.
Instead of amazement, I feel cynical resignation.
The impending doom of the fascist right is the only thing keeping me voting for the dems. If we had rank choice I’d be so much happier voting every election.
That’s the thing. I look around and have no reason to think fascism is impending. It’s here.
Women are getting jailed for miscarriage, cops are hanging out lackadaisically outside a school shooting on their phones with zero consequences, homeless jumped 12% in one year, and the big issue is sending hundreds of billions more off to other countries’ wars.
The only plus is that things have gotten so bad it’s forced unions to become more aggressive and unyielding, which has effected more positive change for workers than the ruling parties have achieved in decades.
Michael Cohen was working for Trump precisely because he couldn’t get a proper lawyer job elsewhere. Good lawyers will steer clear of a client that will ask them to commit crimes for them.
I think this is fairly reductive. I work in a related industry. Often it’s the best lawyers working for the shadier clients, for obvious reasons.
You mean like what happening in Gaza right now? You think all those weapons of war made the last half decade don’t have AI routines programmed into them? You think the Iron curtain works like space invaders with people clacking buttons, or an aim bot shooting wildly before you can even comprehend there’s a target to shoot at?
