Donald HobernThe same day I read about Google's expanded enthusiasm for AI with everything, here is their featured snippet at top of search for "gravity vs altitude".
Bring on the Idiocracy!
Curt Thomas@dhobern incredible. It's normally a mix of wrong and right information that seems generally truthy, but here it managed to actually get everything wrong, and I'd say it even violates the feeling of truthiness
Even the punctuation is untruthy.
To be fair (as my alt text explains) they have done a not-completely-senseless job of summarising the top half of the page they reference. Unfortunately, they have utterly misunderstood the point and the truthfulness of the statements that they have summarised.
Gabriel Pettier@dhobern @conditional_soup yeah, it’s not an uncommon problem, this kind of information extraction is really unfit for content which dispells myths/misconception, it loses context of statements, it’s far from being the first example of that i see, and still they run with it. They should know better, so it’s more than a mistake, it’s a fault.
Jonathan👣🚲@dhobern It’s quoting a wrong answer on Quora (by Anil Agnihotri) https://www.quora.com/Is-gravity-less-at-altitude which itself is based on a list of misconceptions on https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/science/continuum/Pages/gravity.aspx . We’re losing it.
Is gravity less at altitude?
Answer (1 of 12): The short answer? Yes, it is! The longer answer? Eh, not really. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. The force due to gravity on an object, say an apple, is given by Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation: F = \frac{G M_{earth} m_{apple}}{r^2} where F is the force due to grav...
Based on my experience here in Adelaide today, it's alternating between answers based on two different pages.
One is the Education Victoria what-students-think page:
The other is a maths education site:
https://byjus.com/question-answer/how-does-gravity-decreases-with-increase-in-altitude/
@dhobern That other article is confused and misleading at best. Wow.
At this point, just go straight to Wikipedia. For all the caveats that apply, it’s so much better than this nonsense. Not as if the general public is going to find anything better. This is problematic.
Lukas@dhobern "Students may have a range of views about gravity"
Andrej Shadura@dhobern, mavity!
Brian Grinter@andrew_shadura @dhobern I see what you did there 😉
Jonatan Hildén@dhobern Extremely cursed, seeing how the Victoria state government article that is given as the source is actually very well written! Illustrates how hard negation is for these systems.
Owlet of Minerva@dhobern Google's AI apparently woke up feeling better today, but the reference values/comparisons are meaningful only in the context of the linked paper (models assuming a constant average value of 8.7 m/s2 for g across the thermosphere). So not super helpful.
@noctuaminervae I’m still getting the same result
vorlon@dhobern gravity is a 1967 movie starring Sandra Boynton
@dhobern As a former game developer this last sentence makes perfect sense! The physics system does a raycast towards the ground, and if the ground is just below the player then gravity is not applied - to avoid bugs and save performance. I'd expect this to be how God implemented it too.
Raptor 
Andrew Feeney@dhobern I had to look this up because it’s from the Victorian government’s education department website. It turns out that this is from an example of incorrect views on gravity that student’s may have. Context matters!
Jason Petersen (he)@andrewfeeney @dhobern I was hoping it was either that or “correct the misconceptions in this paragraph” in an exam of some kind
GadgetComaI think it's imitating humans just fine. 🤡
Mark Gjøl@dhobern Strange, mine looks a lot less made up....
The comparison with an arbitrary 8,7m/s² makes more sense when looking at the paper it quotes.
I think there is some localisation in what gets selected. Here in Australia, I'm still getting either of two different pages from local sources.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@dhobern
> stops when they reach the ground
Robot using this AI: I am on the ground, no need for stabilization anymore. *front falls down*
> stops when they reach the ground
Robot using this AI: I am on the ground, no need for stabilization anymore. *front falls down*
elmuerte@dhobern I don't think I want to live in a building that tall. Imagine the time it takes to get to the ground floor to do some shopping.
oldguycrustyHa! Terrific example.
Bruce Elrick@dhobern Fortunately this has yet to be exported to Canada.
Antonio J. Delgado❤️🧡💛💚💙💜@dhobern we will need to change the meaning of the verb "to google something" for something like "to get a stupid answer in the Internet"
Daniel Latz@dhobern I expected “increases as we lose” to end with weight
Brandon Rohrer
Cleanair Avatar@dhobern Giberish
AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸@dhobern omg, it starts a bit wrong and steadily accelerates into the end of the paragraph! Remarkable!
Boyko Vatev@dhobern SkyNet blasphemy… 😁
Michael de Jong 🍉@dhobern There should be a law against presenting bullshit as truth, at least for companies. I am ont-googeld (Dutch word for disappointed (actually ontgoocheld but same pronunciation)).
Brandon@dhobern semi-related, your profile picture was familiar and then I realized that you’re behind the udm=14 search engine Firefox addon that I’ve been using for the last few days! Thanks so much for publishing that :)
You're most welcome. I'm so deeply tired (and frankly depressed) by the current genML bubble. Even tiny ways to avoid the nonsense help my mental health a little.
@dhobern I’ve caught a chatGPT-ism a couple different times (including the worst, “certainly! Here’s…”) now when reading modern language/nlp and law review articles. Sad state of academic affairs.
While it's like that, at least the badness is easy to spot.
As we move forward, it's going to be harder and harder to stop garbage and deliberate misinformation polluting all our trusted information sources.
Fake citizen science data that obscures real-world patterns seems to me to be a predictable vector that fossil fuel companies and other low-morality agents are likely to use to advance their causes.
Stoneface Vimes@dhobern so how come falling objects don't get faster once they reach terminal velocity - however far they continue to fall. Yes, I know the whole thing is riddled with errors but I couldn't resist that point.
legraLeGraI guess science educators can breathe a sigh of relief that AI generated student responses are no longer indistinguishable from educated human answers.
In fact, an enterprising educator might intentionally compile the worst offenses into a single exam.
John Faithfull 🌍🇪🇺🏴🧡✊🏻✊🏿@dhobern 😱 This is so enraging, and sad, as the Google-generated text looks like it comes from the cited Web page. But it's a total mish-mash of stuff, emphasising one tiny bit of truth (gravity does decrease a tiny bit with distance from centre of Earth) and then confidently citing stuff from the "common student mistakes" bit of the web page to create an #EdificeOfMince.