The Google device was able to deliver a detailed description of “The Nakba.”

Google is coming in for sharp criticism after video went viral of the Google Nest assistant refusing to answer basic questions about the Holocaust — but having no problem answer questions about the Nakba.

  • jeffw@lemmy.worldM
    773·
    6 months ago

    Google, and its parent company Alphabet, have long come in criticism for developing products pushing social justice absolutism. In February, their AI platform Gemini was mocked for generating comically woke creations including a woman as pope, black Vikings, female NHL players and “diverse” versions of America’s Founding Fathers — not to mention black and Asian Nazi soldiers.

    Why do I click on NYPost links? Smh

    On a serious note, this is a bad look. Google claims it wasn’t a universal issue and that it’s been fixed, so we’ll probably never know the scope or why it only happened with the word “Jew”. Maybe it didn’t recognize religions and only demonyms.

    • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      6 months ago

      Given you’re one of the more rational commenters on Lemmy I’ve seen, you might be interested in why this is such an issue.

      Large language models are stochastic, where their output can vary randomly, but only for equally probable things to say. Like if you say “where are we going to go on this sunny day” it might answer “the beach” one time and “a park” another.

      But when things are not equally probable in the training data, because they have no memory between invocations, they end up collapsing on the most likely answer - this is after all what they were trained to predict.

      For example, if you ask Google’s LLM to give you a random number between one and ten, you’ll get the number seven every single time. This is because humans are more biased to the number 7 (followed by 3) over numbers like 4, and that pattern is picked up by the model, which doesn’t have a memory between invocations so it goes with the most represented option and doesn’t vary it at all over the initial requests (it will vary when there’s a chat history though).

      So what happens when you ask for a description of a doctor? By default, you get a white male every single time. This wouldn’t be an issue if it varied biased probabilities in the training data stochastically, but it can’t do this for demographics any better than it can for numbers between one and ten.

      Obviously an intervention is needed, and various teams are all working on ways to do that. Google initially gave instructions to specifically add diversity to every prompt showing people, which was kind of like using a buzzsaw where a scalpel was needed. It will get better over time, but there’s going to be edge cases that need addressing along the way.

      In terms of the Holocaust query, that topic is often adjacent to conspiratorial denialism which is connected to a host of other opinions no one (other than Gab) wants in a LLM or voice assistant, so here too we’re almost certainly looking at overly broad attempts to silence neo-Nazi denialism propaganda and not some sort of intended censorship of the actual history.

      • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        6 months ago

        we’re almost certainly looking at overly broad attempts to silence neo-Nazi denialism propaganda and not some sort of intended censorship of the actual history.

        And that’s probably what the NY Post is actually upset about.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 months ago

        Any idea why they don’t just apply LLMs to natural language processing? “Turn the living room lights off and bedroom lights on” should be pretty simple to parse, yet my assistant has a breakdown any time I do anything more than one command at a time.

        • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          It’s expensive and slow. Especially to do well and to connect to 3rd party system calls like “turn_off_lights([“living room”])”.

    • Jomega@lemmy.world
      72·
      6 months ago

      Including a woman pope

      A woman was pope.* Thanks Persona 5 for teaching me that.

      • In popular culture. Joanna’s status as a real person is sketchy and possibly made up.
      • BigFig@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        Seems to be generally accepted to be a myth though? At least according to everything in that Wikipedia article

        • Jomega@lemmy.world
          62·
          6 months ago

          My phrasing is not good, but my point is supposed to be that the idea of a female Pope isn’t so far fetched that “wokeness” is the only explanation for depicting one. The idea of Joanna is popular enough to be depicted in the works of art generative AI shamelessly plagiarized trains on, therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise.

          I will edit my original comment to make this more clear.

      • Rekhyt@lemmy.world
        5·
        6 months ago

        Directly from the summary paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked:

        The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.

      • hibsen@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        …I would like to know more. Is it like cultural similarities between seafaring peoples in different locations or have there just always been black people in Viking locations and some of them were also Vikings?

        • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
          6·
          6 months ago

          Here’s a Smithsonian article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis-reveals-vikings-surprising-genetic-diversity-180975865/

          Here’s a different one, from… i dunno the site but this roughly reflects my understanding: https://scandinaviafacts.com/were-the-vikings-black/

          I think generic testing is pretty suspect but at the same time we have more than just that to suggest this.

          Remember, also, that the Vikings (like other people of their era) didn’t have an understanding of race in the sense we do today. Surely they had some concept of people having different skin color (they traveled enough) and of family lineage but the pseudoscientific idea of race theory has yet to be invented.

          Anyway we can be pretty confident Viking slaves (thralls) were sometimes non-white and we know thralls could buy their freedom and free people could take up viking (the profession) so it stands to reason that there could be some. That plus old burial sites suggest that wasn’t just a theory but something that happened. i suspect the culture at the time was even more heterogenous than we would think just from that, though it seems like the white skinned types were still the majority considering modern Scandinavians.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 months ago

      Jew is a genealogical ethnicity as well as a religious designation. Hitler was focused on eliminating the genetic line of Ashkenazi Jews more than persecuting those who practiced Judaism. The AI question is one of ethnicity, not religion.

    • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
      11·
      6 months ago

      …so we’ll probably never know the scope or why it only happened with the word “Jew”.

      Google has been studying natural language processing, n-grams, and semantics for years now. There’s no way they don’t have this data already baked into their AI.

  • morrowind@lemmy.ml
    211·
    6 months ago

    This just seems like a bug. I just tried it on my phone and it works fine. Meanwhile it won’t understand “Nakba”, it keeps thinking it was some english word.

    I think there’s a Google speaker sitting at my home so I’ll test that and get back to you guys, so you don’t have to trust tabloids and twitter users.

    Results:

    Phone: Holocaust - works, Nakba - does not understand

    Speaker: holocaust - works, Nakba - does not

    Results are in, I got pretty much the exact opposite this guy did

  • lakemalcom10@lemm.ee
    237·
    6 months ago

    “Google is where we go to answer our questions and you just really want to feel like you can trust those answers and the company behind them. And moments like these break that trust and make you feel like Google’s supposed core value—truth—has been co-opted by politics,” Urban told The Post after posting to X about his dismay over the results.

    Absolutely not. I do not expect or want Google to decide what is the truth and give me a 3 second sound byte on what the Holocaust was. How do things like this get traction??

  • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
    112·
    6 months ago

    Any article that contains the words “blasted”, “slammed”, or good forbid "claps back"in the title isn’t worth the time to read.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      51·
      6 months ago

      I dunno, I’m starting to feel like this is “hey is for horses” for millennials.

      Who cares if a journalist uses a synonym?

      • gerbler@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 months ago

        It’s just extremely overused. There are other words that could be used but slammed makes it’s way into every second article which is becoming an indicator of a low effort article.