I mean have you heard an Australian accent? It’s like “this is totally a legit accent, we’re speaking English, mate, jabbamawong!” half of it isn’t even words they just make it up as they go like they’re not being sarcastic.
Never bought it.
Search engines don’t make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.
Yeah, but it’s changing. Search Engines today don’t just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it’s becoming a lot more developed.
With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it’s not just showing you a list of sources, but it’s answering you directly, making claims, stating “facts” etc. You can easily forget it’s just a search engine, can’t fault people for this.
I wish search engines “just delivered search results”. Unfortunately, they now directly and confidently answer questions with complete nonsense.
The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.
My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.
Where the info comes from doesn’t exactly change that it’s a problem.
You can talk about media literacy, but why even have the thing exist if it can’t provide correct answers. That’s its only reason for existing.
The article isn’t even about AI. This is just default Bing search. The AI actually does know about Australia.
It’s rather like a wild back how Google search said that there were no French military victories in history. It’s just bad data collection, nothing to do with AI
Reminds me of time when Poland was erased from Time Zones map in Windows, creating “The Great Polish Sea”.
Flat Earth and other loonies will be all over this as an “accidental leak”
