Archived link: https://archive.ph/Vjl1M
Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google’s AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived.
This is genuinely fun, and you can find lots of examples on social media. In the world of AI Overviews, “a loose dog won’t surf” is “a playful way of saying that something is not likely to happen or that something is not going to work out.” The invented phrase “wired is as wired does” is an idiom that means “someone’s behavior or characteristics are a direct result of their inherent nature or ‘wiring,’ much like a computer’s function is determined by its physical connections.”
It all sounds perfectly plausible, delivered with unwavering confidence. Google even provides reference links in some cases, giving the response an added sheen of authority. It’s also wrong, at least in the sense that the overview creates the impression that these are common phrases and not a bunch of random words thrown together. And while it’s silly that AI Overviews thinks “never throw a poodle at a pig” is a proverb with a biblical derivation, it’s also a tidy encapsulation of where generative AI still falls short.
recent research seems to show that llm’s make the decision whether they are going to answer or not pretty early in the process, i.e. before actually “thinking” about whether it can actually answer.
Once it has decided to commit to giving an answer, it will give an answer. Anything goes, as long as it doesn’t say “i don’t know”, because that was what it decided before it started “thinking” about the problem
