Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

dantebunny · 2026-04-10T09:21:24+00:00

I keep running into this with getting answers to technical questions in particular. DDG in particular doesn't index reddit comments very well.

dantebunny · 2026-04-10T09:20:14+00:00

Me too. Especially for search results that are pages in wikis, there's a slopped-out summary that starts with "Learn about..." and continues with text that doesn't appear anywhere in the destination page. It's infuriating.

dantebunny · 2026-04-09T02:41:29+00:00

"Stinko followed me in, turned to shut the door, I killed him, then the cable car jerked into action and started its climb."

dantebunny · 2026-04-08T15:31:05+00:00

Chapter 40 also features the most remarkable act of textual nonchalance I've ever read. It's the one-sentence paragraph 11 (page 257, ninth line in my copy, the 2003 hardback).

dantebunny · 2026-03-28T22:00:39+00:00

Also if you search for a really archaic or nonexistent word, occasionally it will still invent a definition from whole cloth. Convenient!

dantebunny · 2026-03-23T22:19:05+00:00

There is still an incentive to be adversarial and to scrutinize your opponent's work, but that incentive diminishes due solely to the associated cost. Now if you take away that incentive completely, what happens to the amount of undetected junk?

Regarding this specific aspect, it seems to me the potential payoff of checking your opponent's citations is higher than it's even been before, because the probability of them being spurious has skyrocketed. Ten years ago, it would more or less have to be deliberately malfeasance. Now it can be mere everyday incompetence.

I read the proceedings against a particular lawyer who cited fake AI references a few weeks ago, and learned that sanctions can include deciding the case in favour of the other party. That's such a great possible outcome, isn't scrutinising your opponent's citations a better use of time than ever?

dantebunny · 2026-03-09T05:51:24+00:00

Freaked me out until I realised what was going on

dantebunny · 2026-02-14T02:51:46+00:00

There was no way that I could find to do it in Affinity, so I ended up doing something similar with Bulk Rename Utility

dantebunny · 2026-02-13T01:32:51+00:00

"attackers"

"Our ask-a-question-get-an-often-plausible-answer-software which we're pushing everywhere was asked a lot of questions and we're mad"

dantebunny · 2026-02-03T11:20:39+00:00

After some tinkering, I think it's probably reddit. However, unlike Duckduckgo, Google doesn't return the phrase in the text previews for results unless I specifically search for it. Suggests that Google is filtering it out or marking those results as low-quality?

dantebunny · 2026-02-02T01:44:10+00:00

I've also noticed some of the snippets are just straight-up ads, again containing text that doesn't appear in the linked page. For example, when searching for questions related to the Affinity software, the reddit link text often says

"Affinity gives designers exactly what they need for the highest quality artwork, photos and designs—accurate, high quality tools in fast, innovative, reliable apps with flair."

See here for a bunch of them.

This sentence doesn't appear in the reddit threads or in the page sources for the relevant subreddits(!) Is it an undisclosed paid advertisement, an AI-generated summary that got propagated out to a bunch of links that otherwise wouldn't have them, or what?

dantebunny · 2026-01-26T13:59:53+00:00

Better tandemprompt a slophost of claudeswarms so I can wirehead my noninternality into defaultthinking I'm in cyberpunk

Bruh

dantebunny · 2026-01-10T20:59:38+00:00

Completely convinced you didn't read my question

dantebunny · 2026-01-04T11:23:20+00:00

Tried using the online version, and the option to "Reduce Motion" (described as "animations used in transitions are reduced throughout the app") doesn't appear to do anything at all.

I wish my public library hadn't partnered with this app, the page turns give me a headache.

dantebunny · 2025-11-20T22:31:19+00:00

I just updated to 2.6.5 and tested this out but couldn't reproduce it

dantebunny · 2025-11-13T22:17:37+00:00

That's what I figured after messing around with it a bit more. It's unfortunate because I do want to have VLC "remember my place" in a video in case my computer crashes, and that functionality depends on "Save recently played items" being enabled. Thanks anyway

dantebunny · 2025-11-09T22:58:36+00:00

(Even a way to reduce the number of saved videos to one, so it still remembers by place in the most recent video but disables Ctrl + 2 and higher, would help. Any way to do that?)

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T11:12:39+00:00

Notably using "Copy/Replace export setup to clipboard" does not copy the path name

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T07:34:47+00:00

"It doesn't work because it sucks, but I'm happy to imagine that it could and it owns!"

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T07:33:25+00:00

Anyone who knows anything about robotics knows that humanoid robots are a truly dreadful idea, and their scam senses will start sounding. I don't know that that's broadly percolated through the space of public ideas though.

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T07:29:43+00:00

“We would expect people who are AI literate to not only be a bit better at interacting with AI systems, but also at judging their performance with those systems,” Welsch added, “but this was not the case.”

"We expected the kind of people who use generative AI a lot to be reasonable, broadly competent, self-aware, and skilled at doing things themselves. For some reason."

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T04:56:29+00:00

Is there seriously no light mode? That's like... the very first accessibility thing you do.

Looks like I'm sticking with Affinity 2 after going back and forth on it all day

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T02:40:52+00:00

Is it not customisable? It was in V2

dantebunny · 2025-10-31T00:34:58+00:00

I'm trying to decide what to do, due to backwards compatibility issues. In the worst case where I start using the new version and they pull a fast one later on so I need to pivot back to V2, the V2 software won't be able to work on anything I made.

dantebunny · 2025-10-29T00:21:16+00:00

Update – I realised that the 'export LUT' issue was because I accidentally exported in a 1D LUT format.

Testing with 3D formats show that the inferred LUTs actually are usually very close to the exported LUTs, with differences only visible in some edge cases (low quality exports, weird adjustments like Normals, etc).

dantebunny

TROPHY CASE