Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

The really remarkable thing isn't just that #Microsoft has decided that the future of #search isn't links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a #chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar - even more remarkable is that #Google agrees.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

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Pluralistic: Google’s chatbot panic (16 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Microsoft has nothing to lose. It's spent billions on #Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

There's a delightful #Mastodon thread about this, written by @danhon, where he compares the chatbot-#enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to #Tweedledee and #Tweedledum:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected].com/109832788458972865

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Dan Hon (@[email protected])

At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines. "I am Googl-E," said the one plastered in advertisements. "And I am Bingle-Dum," said the other, who was the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

Mastohon

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

"At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines.

"'I am Googl-E,' said the one plastered in ads.

"'And I am Bingle-Dum,' said the other, the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

"'I know you,' said Alice. 'Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?'

"'Oh no,' said Bingle-Dum.

"'We both lie,' added Googl-E."

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

It keeps getting better:

"'This is truly an intolerable situation. If you both lie,'

"-- 'And lie convincingly,' added Bingle-Dum --

"'Yes, thank you. If that is so, then how am I to ever trust either of you?'

"Googl-E and Bingle-Dum turned to face each other and shrugged."

Chatbot search is a terrible idea, especially in an era in which the web is likely to fill up with vast mountains of AI #bullshit, the frozen gabble of #StochasticParrots:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

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On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

ACM Conferences

Google's chatbot strategy shouldn't be adding more madlibs to the internet - rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and #SEO creeps.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, with the company CEO ordering an all-hands scramble to cram chatbots into every part of the googleverse. Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the #PeakOfInflatedExpectations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

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Gartner hype cycle - Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

I just published a theory in #TheAtlantic, under the title "How Google Ran Out of Ideas," where I turn to competition theory to explain Google's sweaty insecurity, an anxiety complex that the company has been plagued by nearly since its inception:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

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How Google Ran Out of Ideas

The company thinks it’s an innovator. In fact, it’s an imitator—and not the best one, either.

The Atlantic

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

The core theory: a quarter of a century, the Google founders had one amazing idea - a better way to do search. The capital markets showered the company in money, and it hired the very best, brightest, most creative people it could find, but then it created a corporate culture that was incapable of capitalizing on their ideas.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Every single product Google made internally - except for its Hotmail clone - died. Some of those products were good, some were terrible, but it didn't matter. Google - a company that cultivated the ballpit-in-the-lobby whimsy of a Willy Wonka factory - couldn't "innovate" at all.

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Google *desperately* wants to be a "making things" company, but it's actually a "buying things" company. Sure, it's good at *operationalizing* and *scaling* products, but that's table-stakes for any monopolist:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The cognitive dissonance of a self-styled "creative genius" whose true genius is spending other people's money to buy other people's products and take credit for them drives people to do truly bonkers thing (as any Twitter user can attest).

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Technical Excellence and Scale

In America, we hope that businesses will grow by inventing amazing things that people love – rather than through deep-pocketed catch-and-kill programs in which every competitor is bought and tamed before it can grow to become a threat. We want vibrant, competitive, innovative markets where...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Google has long exhibited this pathology. In the mid-2000s - after Google chased Yahoo into China and started censoring its search-results and collaborating on state surveillance - we used to say that the way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to get Yahoo to do it first.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

This was quite a time. Yahoo was desperate, failing, a graveyard of promising acquisitions, gutshot and left to bleed out on the public internet as the dueling princelings of Yahoo senior management performed a backstabbing Medici LARP that had them competing to see who could sabotage the others. Going into China was an act of desperation after the company was humiliated by Google's vastly superior search. Watching Google copy *Yahoo's* idiotic gambits was baffling.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Baffling at the time, that is. As time went by and Google slavishly copied other rivals, its pathology of insecurity revealed itself. Google repeatedly failed to make a popular "social" product, and as Facebook commanded an ever-larger share of the ad-market, Google made a full-court press to compete with it.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

The company made #GooglePlus integration a "key performance indictator" for every division, and the result was a bizarre morass of ill-starred "social" features in every Google product - products that billions of users relied on for high-stakes operations, which were suddenly festooned with "social" buttons that made no sense.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

The G+ debacle was truly incredible: *some* G+ features and integrations were *great* and developed loyal followings, but these were overshadowed by the incoherent, top-down insistence of making Google a "social-first" company. When G+ collapsed, it totally imploded, and the useful parts of G+ that people had come to rely upon disappeared along with the stupid parts.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

For anyone who lived through the G+ tragicomedy, Google's pivot to #Bard - a chatbot front-end for search results - is grimly familiar. It's a real "die a hero or live long enough to become a villain moment." Microsoft - the monopolist that was only stayed from strangling Google in its cradle by the trauma of its antitrust dragging - has transformed from a product-creation company to an acquisitions and operations company, and Google is right behind it.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Just last year, Google laid off 12,000 staffers to please a private-equity "activist investor" - in the same year, it declared a $70b stock buyback, extracting enough capital to pay those 12,000 Googlers' salaries for the next 27 years.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Google is a financial company with a sideline in #adtech. It has to be: when your only successful path to growth requires access to the capital markets to fund anticompetitive acquisitions, you can't afford to piss off the money-gods, even if you have a "dual share" structure that lets the founders outvote every other shareholder:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

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Alphabet Investor Relations - Investors

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

#ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season's #web3 and #cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps. One of the clearest and most inspiring critiques of chatbots comes from science fiction writer #TedChiang, whose instant-classsic critique was called "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Chiang points out a key difference between the output of ChatGPT and human authors: a human author's first draft is often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best ChatGPT can hope for is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. ChatGPT is perfectly poised to improve on the SEO copypasta that legions of low-paid workers pump out in a bid to climb the Google search results.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Speaking of Chiang's essay in this week's episode of #ThisMachineKills, #JathanSadowski expertly punctures the #ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the *next* version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/232-400-hundred-years-of-capitalism-led-directly-to-microsoft-viva-sales

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232. 400 Hundred Years of Capitalism Led Directly to Microsoft Viva Sales

Jumping off an FT op-ed on venture capital and tech hype – which aligns great with TMK thought – we discuss the value and risk models of venture capitalism, then get into the emerging market structure

SoundCloud

Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Sadowski notes that #OpenAI's engineers are going to enormous lengths to ensure that the next version won't be trained on any of the output from ChatGPT3. This is a tell: if a #LargeLanguageModel can produce materials that are as good as human-produced text, then why can't the output of ChatGPT3 be used to create ChatGPT4?

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Cory Doctorow Feb 16, 2023

Sadowski has a great term to describe this problem: "#HapsburgAI." Just as royal inbreeding produced a generation of supposed supermen who were incapable of reproducing themselves, so too will feeding a new model on the exhaust stream of the last one produce an ever-worsening gyre of tightly spiraling nonsense that eventually disappears up its own asshole.

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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons

bigblen Feb 16, 2023

@pluralistic holding the microphone up to the speaker doesn't produce more beautiful singing, it produces an incoherent scream.
As for "disappearing up its own asshole", i think the circulation is in the opposite direction, i.e. eating its own shit can't end well

Ravindra Kanodia Feb 17, 2023

@bigblen @pluralistic on the other hand, I love the idea of turning chatbots into a Human Centipede

vollrathian Feb 18, 2023

@pluralistic Thank you for linking Chiang’s essay. Agree that usefulness is over-hyped, and foresee job reductions lower than that of ATMs and sell checkout kiosks. Potential exists for increasing speed and productivity of translations, new software projects, building plans, etc for semi-tailored blueprints that human experts then refine, expand, and validate.

Large leaps in understanding LLMs/translators are required to avoid creation of subtle catastrophic errors

FirefighterGeek

@pluralistic There's an inherent conflict though, in an AI returning results that match what the user wants to find, and returning results that match what generates ad revenue.

Harik Feb 16, 2023

@pluralistic G+ seemed like a great idea right up until they switched to mobile-only postage stamp view with a lower visible character count than tweets.

That's when I learned that only a fool would use any google product that's not named adwords.

Joby (chaotic good)Feb 16, 2023

@pluralistic What's amazing to me is that Google -- the search engine -- appears to have even run out of steam on the -- you would think fairly foundational for them -- idea of "make a search engine that doesn't completely suck ass."