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Comment by germanjoey | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, "Google Instant Answers" are more often than not factually incorrect. It makes me queasy every time I see that... it speaks volumes that's so much more important to them that they keep you on the page that they'd rather give you wrong information than let you go.

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A classic example is the instant answer to "who invented running?"

What I find entertaining is that while answers may be wrong, you can see from the question statement and the returned sample text that it is working perfectly in a mechanical sense. The parsing of the question is correct, the searching works, and so does the ranking. But at the end of the day, it is just applied NLP at a large scale, not AGI, so it doesn't know that it is returning a wrong answer. It doesn't know anything at all!

For those that are curious it displays a Quora answer that states:

>Thomas Running

>Running was invented in 1612 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice at the same time.

It's actually quite and interesting post if you follow the link. Obviously it's not correct in the purest form but there is justification for this answer.

On the other hand "who discovered running?" quotes a tweet telling a variant of the same joke.

I wonder if GPT-3 has learned about Mr Running yet?

At what point do the layers of abstraction and sarcasm become indistinguishable from truth?

I don’t know, but I feel like our societal perfect storm + AI + time will get us there.

That wrong info came from the pages which are listed in the search results. So much objectively, factually incorrect info is written in to blog posts which show up in google search results which then get copied to instant answers. Particularly historical info is filled with mistakes, people misunderstanding the context of some old news article and then taking it out of context to drop on wikipedia where it is taken as fact.

The error usually arises from Google misinterpreting and decontextualizing the page’s content, for example reading a table incorrectly then giving one stat as another stat. The page is correct, it’s Google that’s wrong.

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