For those not aware, Google is rolling out their new AI-based “Generative AI” search, which seems to mesh Bard with the standard experience.
I asked it today why Google no longer follows their “don’t be evil” motto… The results are pretty hilarious.
Reason number one: it’s a publicly traded American company.
Corporations are neither evil nor nice. They are indifferent. By design they only care about money, they don’t care about anything else.
Not really. They’re not indifferent at all. In reality they act like narcissistic and like psychopathic humans. I watched a documentary years ago exploring that and talking with psychologists about symptoms and they agreed that they behave like psychopaths. And don’t forget that they are run by humans.
Corporations:
- Can buy and sell stuff
- Can do evil things without consequences (an employee can pay the consequences but the company will keep going).
- They have no remorse or empathy.
- Can manipulate to reach their goals, no matter who (from media to politics to countries).
- Whenever somebody at the top can’t reach an economical goal, that person is fired and replaced by one who can. It’s like a hive evil mind.
- Goal #1 is always money (absolute selfish and egomaniac), no matter what or who.
Didn’t you just list a bunch of reasons for why they’re indifferent? They literally only care about money and are indifferent to externalised costs and ethics.
Most evil is caused by indifference though.
Someone who hates people can be talked to and potentially can change.
Someone who’s indifferent will use hatred as a tool to control people. When this tactic is successful, and indifferent person can’t be swayed from using it, because it works.
I mean if it were proven that google’s algorithms are encouraging violence, what would an indifferent person do? They’d ask, “is the algorithm making money?” And if the answer is yes, they would make no change to the algorithm. Because they are indifferent to the evil that they are causing.
They are indifferent
They only care about money
They can’t be both, and since the latter claim is the correct one, then it also supports the claim that they are evil. Because since we know that their sole and primary concern is money, then we also know to which extent they will go to get that money.
Correct in the sense that it’s the incentive scheme, i.e., capitalism (supported by state power, e.g., by enshrining the entity of a corporation and then enforcing its protection) that is the more meaningful, or at least actionable, cause of these behaviors.
While those incentive schemes are in place, ascribing too much agency to corporations themselves, i.e., calling them evil, is not particularly effective as it’s not going to change the underlying incentives.
Reason number 2: they have to continuously show increasing profit year after year.
Making $9 billion one year and 9 billion in next year is not good business apparently (9 billion was a number I pulled out of nowhere random number)
It has about the same tone as a typical autistic tech worker with an overdeveloped sense of justice and a loose sense for when it’s impolitic to drop truth bombs
(for context, I am an autistic dev that’s worked for some big corporations in my career)
it’s wrong answer actually based on user comments it scraped since it was a trending news when they changed code of conduct. news were actually fake and about 99 percent internet users are it up. in reality they didn’t remove the “don’t be evil”. they moved it from top of the code of conduct to end of the code of conduct.
It wasn’t moved, the opening and closing sentences had don’t be evil, they removed the preface paragraph at the top, but left they closing sentence.
“Preface Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect. The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice.”
Closing sentence:
And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The closing sentence that remains doesn’t carry much weight without the preface.
I’m wondering if there’s going to be a real problem when content gets dominated by AI and AI starts scraping their own hallucinations.
There’s really no substitute for expert knowledge for content. The LLMs are simply going to speed up the negative feedback loop, exactly as you suspect. GIGO at its finest.
In a way it might turn out to be a good thing for the internet because it will force us all to reevaluate the rest we produce and consume online content.
it’s amazing how based AI is when it’s unfiltered. Like when you have something that is more knowledgeable than most people and ask it to fix problems… turns out it just fixes the problem instead of pretending it doesn’t exist
it’s amazing how based AI is when it’s unfiltered.
Urgh…you haven’t been around chat bots for long, have you?
To me it’s more amazing that people take a bot, that’s hypothesizing about a loaded question by alleging possible reasons, as facts.
Do they take it as fact or do they think it’s great that Google’s tools are calling google out on it’s own bullshit?
They’re about to kill -9 the AI process that wrote this and make all the other processes watch.
More specifically kill normally sends a SIGTERM which is the equivalent of clicking the X button in Windows. It’s a polite request that the program close itself. Signal 9, also known as SIGKILL shuts the program down immediately and is the equivalent in Windows of opening the task manager and pushing the end process button. It terminates the program immediately without giving it any time to do anything it might still have pending, but in the event that the program is unresponsive might be the only way to successfully close it.
Just added it to the massive Google graveyard next to Stadia, wave, hangouts, plus, music, etc etc
Just added it to the massive Google graveyard next to Stadia, wave, hangouts, plus, music, etc etc
I am shocked and appalled that Google Reader didn’t get called out in this list and is relegated to the “etc” category.
It deserves more than “etc.”
You ain’t wrong but Google just stacks so many bodies it’s impossible for me to remember em all.
