@paninid

Man, they've been playing that one close to their collective chest! I had no idea! 🚀

@paninid I had to try this myself, and indeed! Who needs political serial liars if you have Google?!?

@paninid

#googling : To seek out new lies, and new disinformation.

@paninid

Same prompt in Duckduckgo, top 3 results:

@paninid Wait, they are presenting the world of the Space: 1889 tabletop RPG as if it was real?

@paninid This is a great find.

I get a better result from Perplexity AI - better in the sense it does not mention the steampunk fiction - but it also mixes things in a bit weird way.

I suppose the problem with both 'engines' do not have ability to realize the human context (theory of mind?). They are mostly dumb search results combinators.

@paninid the Austrians will certainly not dispute this story but point to it, whenever anybody asks.

@paninid I think the results are accurate, since austria-hungary existed from 1867 to 1918.
AI may hallucinate, but people still have to
a) ask the right questions and most important
b) check the sources (which are very obviously displayed under the top answer).
The last one does apply for every internet search and people couldn't do it before AI. It just made things a bit worse.

@paninid Austria-Hungary was an empire two centuries ago. Were you looking for its space program? If you were looking for actual space programs of Austria and Hungary, wouldn’t it be better to search separately for each country?

@paninid

If you were a member of that Steampunk fandom you'd be super happy with that search result. 😄

Seriously though, that's just a page snippet from the highest ranking match for that query. It's not from their AI engine.

@paninid <googly eyes emoji>

@paninid

The problem is everything is just data, fiction and lies are too…

@paninid

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th Century..."

@paninid IMHO Google should be used as a keyword search engine, not a fact checker. If fantasy is written, fantasy is what will be found.

@paninid search for "2001 in space" and you mostly get stuff about some old movie ... regardless of the search engine.

@paninid Google: we can invent it for you, wholesale

@paninid looks to me like a totally normal result of a query about anything fictional. Its not trying to pass it off as reality as the nature of the quoted sources makes quite clear. A problematic result would be if their 'AI' results tried to list this as the first mission into space without context.

@paninid

This is not an AI response, this is a match to your query.

Austria-Hungary never had an actual space program, but there is a steampunk fiction match.

It gave you exactly the right response - you can literally see the source. It's right there.

Yes, Google AI overviews are generally utter shit, they do not supply the source. And this is not that.

*You* need to learn the difference.

@paninid
Seems legit. And harmless. It's not harmless.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-police-reports/

@paninid it is! Dammit the whole thing is going to shite

@paninid
That’s totally wrong. The rocket was steam-powered.
@trendytoots

#googling

@paninid Googling just got much more interesting

@paninid I used to work on this search feature at Google. I don't work at Google anymore.

There is a line between "information retrieval machine" and "wish fulfillment machine" that Google Search crossed some time ago. There were too many incentives (growth, more user eyeballs if you tell people what they want to hear or entertain them) for it not to.

@paninid I think that platypus has bolted.

@paninid For the many, many people responding that this is a good top match for the query, try entering it in DuckDuckGo and see what happens. The terms are broken out, and you get a string of matches for recent Austrian space initiatives and Hungarian astronauts. That's what I would expect from a search engine. If I want to peg it to the 19th century or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there are syntax tweaks I can use to do that, but that should be on me.

@paninid
google ain't a search engine anymore, it's a growth engine.. #prplXprpgnd

@paninid@mastodon.world that or someone is going to retroactively try to claim territory on Mars

@paninid@mastodon.world This is really just a bad query. It returns a fitting result, though not to something you want.

I can't even really tell what you're asking for. Austria-Hungary stopped existing in 1918, before any space programs, and you can't just ask for two countries space programs at once.

"Space travel by country" would probably get you what you want.

@paninid googling is becoming a dice roll on AI bamboozling

@paninid What was the search term that yielded that result?

@paninid

@lauren (who has deep connections inside Google and has worked with them) has been lambasting these "AI" summaries in search results since Google first added them. I'm with him; they are utterly useless, because even if they were correct, you can't just trust them to be so - you need to go back to the original sources and validate it yourself.

In which case, why bother with the summaries in the first place? Just show the original sources as the search results.

@paninid

I'm shocked that my Austrian school education kept that secret!!

Especially since Austria-Hungary was portrayed quite positively. The vibe was "Due to evil nationalism, those other countries no longer wanted to be governed by us and destroyed our great Danube Monarchy diversity project :-( "

I didn't learn anything about the horrible poverty in Galicia, for instance...

@paninid @kimlockhartga Absolutely love the “you’re using it wrong” responses. You could certainly say the Google is using LLMs wrong by applying them to the entire internet and returning responses without context.

@paninid Reminds me of the time GPT gave the population of Mars based on one of the Expanse books. This is probably going to really wind up some online conspiracy theorists. Some of that stuff ends up being mostly benign, or at least kind of contained, but there's no real predicting it, so it would definitely be better if google wasn't throwing this fuel on the fire.

@paninid Google = bullshit some ridiculous explanation about any subject leaving near to no doubt about its inexactitude

@paninid

It's actually pretty crazy that the USA only made it to the moon 50 years later and then made such a big deal about it. 😂

@paninid I got the same result but it has a completely different context: Whatever AI looks like, it's not:

@paninid @jwildeboer things like this and others have made that I want to get rit of Google and Android as soon as possible.

@paninid as a galician, I am really proud of this :blobcatblep:

@paninid@mastodon.world oh it took me a minute to catch what was wrong with the result

@paninid Well... Yes, it's a summary from the Steampunk Space Wiki... A *fictional* thing.

Do I think it's a bit confusing if you don't know what you're looking at? Yes.
Is it incorrect? No, not really.

@paninid

Yeah, #Google isn't as good as it used to be.

My first choice for #WebSearch is #DuckDuckGo .

@paninid Google search is broken. What's better?

@paninid Google AI told me that Google AI will solve this problem before the Hitler clones in Antarctica are released.

@paninid "steampunk" is a bit of a giveaway, is it not?

@paninid

This is not AI, it is a correct response to a ludicrous query.

Strangely enough, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, roughly 1867-1918, like the *rest of the f-ing world*, did not have a space program.

But clearly there is a steampunk story that matches the search criteria, and that' what you got.

I'm all for bashing LLMs but *you (a human?)* need to be able to distinguish an AI response from a proper query match.

Hint: LLMs don't cite sources, this does.

@paninid could not reproduce.

@paninid
Not to defend google, but given that Austria-Hungary has not existed as its own entity for over a hundred years, what results other than steampunk fiction would you expect to find?

@paninid Wow. I did not know that.