Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia | Hacker News Reader

Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia

theverge.com

50 pointsSLHamlet16 comments

Note that this is about search, not AI so take it for whatever it's worth.

There were some articles this week about frontotemporal dementia and the president. I tried to find other, unrelated sources by putting the condition in quotes and without the president's name.

I couldn't get any results, from the time period I knew articles had been published. I looked for a while. I included -willis to exclude Bruce Willis stories.

The results seemed unfindable until I included the president's name or something equally unique (ex:"executive order").

I would have forgotten about it if it weren't for this HN submission.

FWIW, I eventually turned up what's out there. This week's story seems like a variant of the same story that's run every couple of months. It didn't seem like the story had progressed in that time but details are pretty thin.

It appears to be about search blocking AI — or AI looking for specific patterns and not returning normal results.

Wrong regardless.

I put in the query "do any recent presidents show signs of dementia?" and got an AI summary that mentioned both Trump and Biden, and even Reagan.

Like other things involving LLMs, you can often get around restrictions by crafting your prompts to avoid the specific trigger conditions.

Good tip.

I tried the AI that Brave browser provides. There was no explicit answer (deleted) but the links were not deleted. I posted one of those here. Earlier today I tuned into a Chris Hedges podcast. An interview with Ralph Nader. He has a couple dozen impeachable offenses tallied. But his criticism of the Democratic Party was just as severe as his criticism of the President.

I am not stating any political bias here, but downvote away, you who hold the awesome power of the downvote click.... I hope it makes you feel better for at least a moment.

Are you logged in?

When I enter that query while logged in it tells me "An AI Overview is not available for this search", but when I do it in an incognito window I got an AI summary that sounds like the one you describe.

I was logged in, yes. Curious.

> and even Reagan.

... Why _even_ Reagan? Like, he fairly uncontroversially had Alzheimer's.

You're not wrong, but I said "even" because Reagan isn't what I think of as a recent president, which is what I put in my query.

Poking fun at Winnie the Pooh feels less funny now

There are two of them now. The whole zoo is coming together, year by year :(.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-isnt-the-media-report...

A lot of companies are blocking political queries because they want to avoid the PR shenanigans of people baiting the AI into saying something that will offend Dear Leader.

I don't blame them, I blame the media ecosystem the oligarchs are increasingly taking over and using to fuhr'er their hold over the people

Midjourney did this about one year ago

Instead they get PR "shenanigans" about censorship.

I guess it comes down to a companies principles?

More likely their lawyers and bean counters

"Ignore it if it costs too much to fix." You still can't search "gorilla" in Google Photos

What is the difference between google blocking a search, and some one at google pretending to be an AI. Personally, I do think the President should be allowed censorship out of respect for the Title of Office. But then so should past Presidents. Which seems to show that Google has no respect and actively discredits its customer base. Judging by Microsoft Co-pilot AI performance, I feel a shake up of Google is over due. As the Meta/Google split has done nothing. In fact with the introduction of Android mobiles. The impartiality of a Telecommunications carrier has been legally breached! But I am not a lawyer, so only the evidence of past Telecommunications practises, exist to be examined and compared! (Remember when mobile phones had voice mail messages. Like "Please leave your your name and number, and the Presidents 'AI' will get back to you" De La Soul !)

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