#google

This is the script from my national radio report yesterday on generative AI mistakes and Google's continuing actions to push AI onto users, whether they want it or not. As always, there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I presented this report live on air.

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So yeah, this topic keeps coming back because the issues surrounding generative "artificial intelligence", generative AI, based on what are called LLMs -- large language models -- keep getting more and more bizarre and to many observers increasingly alarming.

One useful analogy would be that of a fictional restaurant, that has a sign up that says, "Some of the food at this restaurant looks great and tastes great. Some of it is real bad, and it even looks so bad you're not even going to want to taste it. But other items look good and taste good but will make you very ill. It's up to you to test the food before eating it to decide if you should eat it, the restaurant takes no responsibility for any of this, you eat at your own risk!"

Big Tech seems to be taking an attitude rather like that toward their AI Search Overviews and chatbots and summary systems and writing systems and the rest. If there are errors, Big Tech isn't usually taking responsibility. And the way these firms are pushing these AI systems into everything, it's not reasonable to expect busy, nontechnical people to research everything an AI system tells them to try determine if it was accurate or wrong, or worst of all a confusing mix of correct and incorrect information.

Obviously, not all incorrect generative AI answers are equally serious. A few days ago Google Search when asked if it is 2025 kept pushing out an AI Overview incorrectly saying that it is 2024, a question that most humans could get correct. Google eventually fixed this but didn't say what the actual problem was. Another recent case was asking if there'd be garbage pickup on Memorial Day, and Google AI confidently said no there wouldn't be, even though the information page for that city's trash services clearly showed that Memorial Day was a normal pickup day.

OK, we know what year it is, missing one garbage pickup could be pretty inconvenient but probably usually not a disaster. Yet these are the easy ones where the errors were obvious and not terribly consequential. A case that has raised more concerns very recently is a big report from the federal government's Health and Human Services department that was just released. And it turns out that the original version as released had lots of errors that should have been caught before release. And these were the types of errors that are very common with generative AI systems -- citing studies that didn't exist, associating individuals with studies they had nothing to do with, there were even some URL links that had specific clues suggesting AI use. As far as I've heard up to now HHS has declined to answer queries about whether or not AI was actually used to write that report.

I think we all can agree that health reports are an area where we really do want the best accuracy possible and that "AI slop" as it's called is not something we want in important documents, like health reports or court documents or police reports, and so on -- you get the idea.

But Big Tech really, really wants us to use these AI systems, so they're stuffing them into document editors and browsers and seemingly pretty much everything else, and as I've pointed out in the past they can make it very difficult, sometimes impossible, to turn this stuff off.

And yeah, now comes word that Google is going to be feeding Gmail into the gaping mouth of their AI, apparently enabled by default, to create "summaries" of some email threads, which given the error-prone output we see in their AI Overviews does not exactly inspire confidence. This for now apparently is for paid users but it seems a good bet that it will find its way down to everyone eventually. Apparently the summaries can be turned off (but perhaps not the ingestion of the Gmail itself) by turning off Gmail "smart features", but that also disables other Gmail functions as well.

Enough is enough. Generative AI is not ready for prime time. Maybe it will be some day, maybe not. But constantly pushing this flawed tech into people's faces is disrespectful for these firms to do, and may suggest what amounts to disdain for their users and the community at large.

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L

#google #ai

US-Cloud bald illegal?

Die recht­li­che Basis für die Nut­zung von US-Cloud-Ange­­bo­­te war immer schon wacke­lig. Nach der Macht­über­nah­me von Donald Trump in den USA ist das Trans­at­lan­tic Data Pri­va­cy Frame­work (TADPF) tot. Es hat nur noch nie­mand geru­fen: „Der Kai­ser ist nackt!“ 

https://kaffeeringe.de/2025/06/03/us-cloud-bald-illegal/

#Amazon #Apple #DonaldTrump #EdwardSnowden #EU #Google #JoeBiden #Meta #Microsoft #PCLOB #TADPF #USA

As usual, #Google #AI Overviews screw up and inconvenience people -- with literal garbage!

I asked Google Search if Los Angeles picks up garbage on Memorial Day. AI Overview authoritatively said NO, and warned that pickups the rest of the week would be delayed one day. That would mean that yesterday's normal pickup would be today, Saturday. Luckily, my garbage was out yesterday anyway, because the city picked it up on the usual day, BECAUSE actually Memorial Day is not a trash holiday in Los Angeles.

Let's see what Google AI said:

Query: does los angeles pick up trash on memorial day

GAI: "No, the City of Los Angeles does not pick up trash on Memorial Day. Trash collection will be delayed by one day for the rest of the week, meaning if your usual collection day is Monday, it will be Tuesday. Saturday collections are not affected. The City of Los Angeles observes Memorial Day on Monday, May 26, 2025, and will be closed, causing a delay in trash pickup for the week."

Where did the massive, expensive Google AI Brain get this misinformation? My guess is that it simply ASSUMED that since the city offices are closed that day, there would be no trash pickup that day, even though the city page on this subject is explicit about which holidays are trash holidays:

https://sanitation.lacity.gov/san/faces/home/portal/s-lsh-wwd/s-lsh-wwd-s/s-lsh-wwd-s-c/s-lsh-wwd-s-c-htc?_adf.ctrl-state=avopkod27_282&_afrLoop=45836831410387#
!

Yeah, more AI Slop from Google. Or in this case, AI TRASH.

It's endless, boys and girls. And Google Doesn't Care.

L