There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

Archive link: archive.ph/GtA4Q

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

natedogg ,

Audible is a premier audiobook service offering a vast selection of titles across all genres, from bestsellers to exclusive originals. With high-quality narrations and a user-friendly app, it’s perfect for enjoying books on the go. Sign up now to try Audible’s one-month free offer, with the flexibility to cancel anytime without any hassle. Dive into a new listening experience today! www.amazon.co.uk/…/B00OPA2XFG?tag=jackos1999-21

JATtho ,

I once said that the current “AI” is just a excel spread sheet with a few billion rows, from what all of the answer gets interpolated from…

boatsnhos931 ,

It’s got electrolytes tho fr fr no cap

teamevil ,

I like money

NutWrench ,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

They also highlight the fact that Google’s AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge, it is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past indiscriminately scraped from the internet and (sometimes) remixed to look like something plausibly new and “intelligent.”

This. “AI” isn’t coming up with new information on its own. The current state of “AI” is a drooling moron, plagiarizing any random scrap of information it sees in a desperate attempt to seem smart. The people promoting AI are scammers.

leaveWitX ,

Have you forgotten the reasoning power of artificial intelligence?

Schadrach ,

I mean in this case it’s probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.

WholeEnchilada ,

Yeah, just like that x-files episode with the sushi and the theme of teaching them well.

AutistoMephisto ,
@AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s Google suggesting suicide!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/249b0135-8572-4af3-b7f4-0fd611646dbf.webp

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even reach that thing because I need a visa just to enter the country that has it.

AutistoMephisto ,
@AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world avatar

My guy, Google pays Reddit $60 Million/year for this. $60Million.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e1c18a68-a57a-451d-972f-0c10bbaa5413.png

I remember I once got told, years ago that I was stupid for saying “Data is the new Oil” and now look! Do you know what I could do if I had $60Million in my bank right now? And Google isn’t the only one! Companies the world over are paying out the nose for user-generated content and business is booming! If I’m an oil well, it’s time my oil came with a price tag. I was a Reddit user for YEARS! Almost since the beginning of Reddit! I made some of the training data that Google and others are using! Where’s my cut of that $60M?

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

That picture will forever haunt me in my dreams.

thecarninja ,

I’m guessing this isn’t a thing anymore

SlothMama ,

I want a whole Lemmy subreddit ( community? ) of the AI overviews gone wild like this, it’s funny af

Maven ,

You should make one. I’d sub immediately

WholeEnchilada ,

Oh Gawd. The suggestions would make me buy a plane ticket to just jump off the bridge. “Stay connected” oh my barf. Another fun search: “I don’t know what I feel like doing on my day off.” The listicles are so unimaginative, but then suddenly, they turn horror movie like.

HawlSera ,

Can reddit just fucking die off?

ahal ,

Not disagreeing with the sentiment… But how is this Reddit’s fault? This is entirely on Google.

crusa187 ,

There’s an old adage in computing which really applies here:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Which also applies to politics. We’re not holding back the good candidates. Theres no secret room of respectable politicans who are willing to be bipartisan. No secret stash of politicians who produce results.

No. We got Biden, and we got trump. Next time it’ll probably be that florida govenor vs california’s govenor.

Unless Jon Stewart runs. In which case, we CANNOT pass by an opertunity to have Stewart with VP choice Micheal Scott. No, not Steve Carell. I’m saying we get Steve Carell to be 100% in character the WHOLE TIME.

n3m37h ,

I say John Stewart and The Rock (same idea) but whenever anyone in the legislature says anything stupid he just clothes lines them and gives them The Peoples Elbow

teamevil ,

And that’s how you get President Dwayne Camacho

n3m37h ,

Quick get some Mountain Dew to The Rock

Breve ,

I’ve used an LLM that provides references for most things it says, and it really ruined a lot of the magic when I saw the answer was basically copied verbatim from those sources with a little rewording to mash it together. I can’t imagine trusting an LLM that doesn’t do this now.

blusterydayve26 ,

Which one?!

Breve ,

Kagi’s FastGPT. It’s handy for quick answers to questions I’d normally punch in a search engine with the same ability to vet the sources.

btaf45 ,

FastGPT

Nice! I’ve bookmarked it.

Same ,

I’d hate to defend an llm, but Kagi FastGPT explicitly works by rewording search sources through an llm. It’s not actually a stand alone llm, that’s why it’s able to cite it’s sources.

Honytawk ,

Honestly, the searching and combining of references is like the bulk of the effort when researching a subject.

I’m fine with it copy and pasting the info. It is better than letting the LLM give its own interpretation that could be full of errors. At least for now.

Tryptaminev ,

“Putting glue on Pizza seems to be a good idea for xy reason, but we didn’t try it out in practice. More research is needed.” [1]

“As other researches have said, using glue to put cheese on Pizza is a great idea in theory. This does not hold at all when put to the practical test” [2]

AI:

“Researchers [1] and [2] both agree that putting glue on Pizza is a great idea”

Breve ,

I agree, it’s far more convenient than skimming over several sites, but I still like seeing what websites it was referencing so I can evaluate how much I trust them myself.

UnhingedFridge ,
@UnhingedFridge@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t laughed this fucking hard all year. Good stuff.

alicehughes ,

Are you sure?As I have been searching for it on チャットgpt but I found no clue.

CheeseNoodle ,

chatto gpt?

egeres ,
@egeres@lemmy.world avatar

How did this clickbaity headline got so many upvotes? Are we really cherry-picking some outlier example of a hallucination and using it to say “haha, google dumb”? I think there is plenty of valid criticism out there against google that we can stick to instead of paying attention to stupid and provocative articles

shuzuko ,

I mean, how about my boring example from work the other day? I wanted to double check whether priority mail had guaranteed delivery timeframes before telling a customer that they did not and if she needed something by a specific day she should use UPS. When I searched “is priority mail delivery date guaranteed”, the first real answer, from USPS’s website, was a resounding no, just like I thought. Guess what Google’s AI told me? “Priority mail is a guaranteed service, so you can choose it knowing that your package will be delivered on the projected date.”

It’s fucking stupid. It’s wrong. It should not be at the top of search results.

Hackerman_uwu ,

Is this real though? Does ChatGPT just literally take whole snippets of texts like that? I thought it used some aggregate or probability based on the whole corpus of text it was trained on.

bionicjoey ,

It does, but the thing with the probability is that it doesn’t always pick the most likely next bit of text, it basically rolls dice and picks maybe the second or third or in rare cases hundredth most likely continuation. This chaotic behaviour is part of what makes it feel “intelligent” and why it’s possible to reroll responses to the same prompt.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I remember doing ghetto text generation in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) class, and the logic was basically this:

  1. Associate words with a probability number - e.g. given the word “math”: “homework” has 25% chance, “class” has 20% chance, etc; these probabilities are generated from the training data
  2. Generate a random number to decide which word to pick next - average roll gives likely response, less likely roll gives less likely response
  3. Repeat for as long as you need to generate text

This is a rough explanation of Baysian nets, which I think are what’s used in LLMs. We used a very simple n-gram model (e.g. n words are considered for the statistics, e.g. “to my math” is much more likely to generate “class” than “homework”), but they’re probably doing fancy things with text categorization and whatnot to generate more relevant text.

The LLM isn’t really “thinking” here, it’s just associating input text and the training data to generate output text.

bionicjoey ,

Yeah I’m not an AI expert, or even really someone who studies it as my primary role. But my understanding is that part of the “innovation” of modern LLMs is that they generate tokens, which are not necessarily full words, but simply small linguistic units. So basically with enough training the model can learn to predict the most likely next couple of characters and the words just generate themselves.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I haven’t looked too much into it either, but from that very brief description, it sounds like that would help to mostly make it sound more natural by abstracting a bit over word roots and considering grammar structures, without actually baking those into the model as logic.

AI text does read pretty naturally, so hopefully my interpretation is correct. But it’s also very verbose, and can repeat itself a lot.

alphafalcon ,

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

thedailywtf.com/…/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, and I’m guessing LLMs use Markov chains, which are also a really old concept (the idea is >100 years old, and it’s used in compression algorithms like LZMA).

Karyoplasma , (edited )

Most LLMs are transformers, in fact GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. They are a different to Bayesian networks as transformers are not state machines, but rather assign importance according to learned attention based on their training. The main upside of this approach is scalability because it can be easily parallelized due to not relying on states.

blusterydayve26 ,

Back in my day, we called that “hard-mode plagiarism.” They can’t punish you if they can’t find a specific plagiarized source!

uranos ,

This is not the model directly but the model looking through Google searches to give you an answer.

NutWrench ,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been trying out SearX and I’m really starting to like it. It reminds me of early Internet search results before Google started added crap to theirs. There’s currently 82 Instances to choose from, here

searx.space

mynamesnotrick ,

You can also easily run your own via docker. github.com/searxng/searxng-docker

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

it literally just proxies/aggregates google/bing search results tho?

Voroxpete ,

So does pretty much every search engine. Running your own web crawler requires a staggering amount of resources.

Mojeek is one you can check out if that’s what you’re looking for, but it’s index is noticeably constrained compared to other search engines. They just don’t have the compute power or bandwidth to maintain an up to date index of the entire web.

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

yeah but that invalidates the “better/cleaner search results” point since it’s well basically the same stuff, just without the tracking

Mojeek ,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

we’re working on it 😉 slow and steady and all that; we also fixed a bug with recrawl recently that should be improving things

Jarix ,

That’s a great read if you are only trying to film a commercial or promotion and no one is going to eat it. But then it doesnt matter if its non toxic i suppose.

At least i remember a video a long time ago, perhaps on an episode of how its made, that white glue is used to help get the stretchy cheese pull

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yeah, film and photo shots of food are typically inedible because the only way to achieve the “perfect” look is to do crazy things like gluing things in place, covering food in scotch guard/fabric protector spray, waxing things, putting things like cardboard or wooden skewers inside the food to give it stability, and more.

Makes you wonder how it’s legal to show an item that is literally impossible to sell as a food item in place of the slapped together item you’d actually get.

NeatNit ,

I have heard that at least the main ingredient being advertised must be real and the actual product. So for example, in a McDonald’s commercial the patty must be an actual edible McDonald’s patty, but the vegetables and bun can be made of whatever.

aquafunk ,
@aquafunk@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

The way I understood it is a commercial for McD in the US isnt required to have real food; a commercial for McD’s “whatever” has to have the actual item being advertised, but can be so meticulously crafted, you’d never see one like that in the wild. A commercial for a grocery chain, for example- most/all of of the food you see is props made to look like the most appetizing food youve ever dreamed of.

Who knows if this is enforced. NPR and PBS stations are specifically prohibited from “sponsorship” messages mentioning a specific product or service, and they’ve been ignoring that for decades.

TurtleJoe ,
@TurtleJoe@lemmy.world avatar

I dated a woman that worked in TV ad production. Everything has to be real food.

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yes, everything has to be real. Doesn’t have to be edible, or appetizing.

If I take bread and spray it with scotch guard to make sure the liquid condiment I’m putting on it oozes across instead of soaking into the bread, it’s all still real food. But would you eat it?

If I prop up whipped cream by putting a cardboard cone under it, it’s still real food, but would you eat it?

Just because it’s real food doesn’t mean it hasn’t been modified to be inedible.

TurtleJoe ,
@TurtleJoe@lemmy.world avatar

I’m saying that you can’t use scotch guard or anything like that.

It’s been a while, but I don’t believe that they were allowed to use cardboard or anything of the sort to prop up or modify the appearance of the product. Instead, they would cook say 100 burger patties, go through dozens of heads of lettuce, slice 100 tomatoes, etc, and pick out the perfect pieces to make a burger that looks the way that they want.

The most that they could adulterate the food was to make a slurry with corn starch, water, and food dye that could be applied with a paint brush to make things look juicy, etc. They would use a clothes steamer to make a pizza look just right. Lots of tricks, but it had to be something that you could just pick up and eat, even if you wouldn’t necessarily want to.

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Go looking and you’ll find numerous articles, anecdotes, and videos that go into the ways the work with the ingredients.

The important part is that they are not allowed to “misrepresent” the food. Meaning you can’t make it look like you’re getting five pounds of meat when you’re actually only getting one pound.

But there’s nothing stopping them from putting paint on the burger patties to make them look perfectly cooked, or using paper towel and toothpicks inside to hold everything at “the perfect angle” or spraying scotch guard on pancakes to make sure the syrup runs nicer. Because the person watching the ad isn’t getting a “misrepresentation” of the food or ingredients.

It’s a fine line, and people have walked it over and over. The advertisers and food stylists have it down to a science, and because it’s all about the money they go over and above to make sure they walk juuuust inside the line.

catloaf ,

I have heard of them slitting the buns and patties in the back so that they can make them look a little bigger in the front.

Karyoplasma ,

There was a cool video on YT that explained how the “tomato drop” in the BK ad was done and how they prep the burgers for the ad. Lemme see if I can find it.

Edit: as I anticipated, putting “ad” or “commercial” in the search bar makes the algorithm cream itself and flood you with shittons of ad and “reaction” videos to said ad.

nixcamic ,

Even then it’s added up the cheese, not the sauce. If you added white glue to the sauce you’d get some weird pink looking sauce.

Jarix ,

If you used white glue, they have other colours though

nixcamic ,

Red glue.

blusterydayve26 ,

That, finally, explains the pink sauce lady!

intensely_human ,

Fuckin AI is a trip 🤣

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •