Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

But I can find porn and racism using Google search right now, how is that different? You have to disable their filters, but you can find it. Why is there no such thing for the google generation bots, I don't see why it would be so much worse here?

View on HN

I'm leaning towards 'there is a difference between being the one who enables access to x and being the one who created x' (albeit not a substantive one for the end user), but that leaves open the question of why that doesn't apply to, eg, social media platforms. Maybe people think of google search as closer to an ISP than a platform?

It's not fundamentally different. It's just not making that big of a headline because Google search isn't "new and exciting". But to give you some examples:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-qu...

https://ischool.uw.edu/news/2022/02/googles-ceo-image-search...

I think users are desensitized to what google search turns up. Generative AI is the latest and greatest thing and so people are curious and wary, hustlers are taking advantage of these people to drive monetized "engagement".

> how is that different?

Because 'those' legal battles over search have already been fought and are established law across most countries.

When you throw in some new application now all that same stuff goes back to court and gets fought again. Section 230 is already legally contentious enough these days.

I cannot explain why Google gets a pass, possibly just because they are well entrenched and not an easy target.

But AI models are new, they are vulnerable to criticism, and they are absolutely ripe for a group of "antis" to form around.

Well if you have no explanation for that I don’t see why we should try and use your model to understand anything about being risk adverse. They don’t care about being sued, they want to change reality.

That's a pretty unreasonably high standard to hold.

It's an offhand comment in a discussion on the internet not a research paper, expecting me to immediately have an answer to every possible angle here that I haven't immediately considered is a bit much.

Take it or leave it, I don't really care. I was just hoping to have an interesting conversation.

Yeah, you can find incorrect information on Google too, but you'll find a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth on HN about "hallucination". So the simple answer is that lots of people treat them differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com