I simply do not trust generative AI answers from any platform. Even when there are sources shown, I can't know what parts of the answers are from which of the sources, or how the data from those sources might have been massaged, mangled, and misinterpreted to generate the answer.
I might as well just go directly to the sources, which is exactly what I would have done via blue links before (for example) #Google AI Overviews existed.
When I see (or hear, e.g., via Google Home) a conventional sourced answer to a question (e.g., According to the American Medical Association website ...) I know what I'm dealing with.
Not so with generative AI answers. They are impossible to reasonably evaluate. They are blacker boxes than the AI firms themselves, and the firms will not stand behind the answers and take any responsibility for them at all, hiding behind "these may be wrong, double check!" disclaimers.
PSA: #YouTube has begun blocking import on many hosts, including the one we use at TILvids. This means that auto-sync for channels will no longer work, which puts incredible pressure/effort on creators like @thelinuxEXP trying to make content available in multiple locations. Because of this, expect there to be some disruptions in content availability.
This is why it's so important to support non #Google software and services, because they are swiftly becoming a bad actor in the world of #tech
For what it's worth, I'm seeing a lot of #Mastodon postings including my own coming up in #Google Search results. And presumably being sucked into their AI vacuum chamber as well.
[…] We’re heeding the call from over 1000 #Google and #Amazon workers to rise up against the contract, known as Project Nimbus. Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable #apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism. Following in the footsteps of those who fought to divest from apartheid South Africa and won, it’s our responsibility to rise up in support of Palestinian freedom. The Amazon and Google execs who signed this contract can still choose to be on the right side of history.
Demand Amazon & Google stop doing business with Israeli apartheid & powering the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza
ℹ #MeredithWhittaker practises what she preaches. As the president of the #Signal Foundation, she’s a strident voice backing privacy for all. But she doesn’t just spout hollow words
In 2018, she burst into public view as one of the organisers of the #Google walkouts, mobilising 20,000 employees of the search giant in a twin protest over the company’s support for state surveillance and failings over sexual misconduct ⏩
I've heard the most ridiculous #HotTake ever: that because I don't store credit card information on my #Google account, I don't deserve the right to #privacy
When #Google tells you to eat glue and rocks, and the Internet sinks under hallucinatory generative "content" madly seeking clicks and likes, we went back to an actual, honest to goodness, encyclopedia.
My latest piece, why we should care about knowledge in the age of generative AI, at @publicbooks
"The challenge is to listen to each other and to integrate among conflicting perspectives with grace and care, not to shout louder."
The last thing #Google has done with Gemini API, is to be able to plug a function, to connect it to APIs, you have to make it openapi and she interprets the answer with the data she receives, could be done for the #mastodon API, there I leave it.
Dang! #Apple is 💩 all over #Google, #Microsoft, & #Meta various #AI programs, by emphasizing privacy, personalization, & having your data on your iPhone & not a “warehouse” somewhere. #WWDC
Did you know that #XScreenSaver (yes, the collection of screensavers for X11) is available on Android?
And that #Google requires it to have a privacy policy in order to be available in the Play Store?
And that the maintainer chose to crowd-source a privacy policy where every item starts with "Unlike Google"?
It's become a great list of all the privacy violations Google did and still does. And I thought that it's gonna be long, but it's even longer than I imagined.
Here's a brilliant article about the opaque and broken world of programmatic advertising.
These platforms truly are a cesspit.
They are causing billions of ad dollars from reputable brands to be pumped into disinformation sites.
Meanwhile, ads are systematically blocked from appearing on reputable news sites that have articles that include words like "Palestine", "black", or "gay".
And the biggest player in this industry? Google!
Just another way Google is enshittifying the internet for profit.
In case you don't follow this stuff, many people in the creator community are apparently very upset at #Adobe, who has moved full steam into subscription cloud-based services with everything that implies.
It seems they recently asked users to accept some relatively minor changes in their terms of service, relating to content moderation, what content Adobe can view and use, legal requirements, etc.
I said these were minor changes and from what I've seen they seem to be that. But the problem is that this has attracted creators' attention to terms of service that most didn't read or understand fully before this, which is quite a nasty piece of work. Very typical of many cloud services today though. So the creator community is up in arms, with new YouTube videos on the topic seemingly popping up by the hour. An "explainer" that Adobe sent out to try calm things down appears to have just made things worse.
Talk about unforced errors. It's not just #Google.
yes, i know that #facebook#reddit#google and such companies are using the content users post to train #ai models.
this is problematic.
moving to the #fediverse in no way solves this - in fact it makes it easier for anyone to train on the data you enter. they no longer have to own and run the server you're on.
Wir sollten bei jeder Gelegenheit die Vorteile von quelloffener Software und Diensten hervorheben. Die Deutungshoheit Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple und Co. zu überlassen, hat uns dorthin geführt, wo wir heute stehen: Ein datengetriebenes Web, das ohne Nutzerdaten nicht überlebt und uns mit Werbung bombardiert.
Since we all have to listen to the constant bitching about AI and the enshittificaton of search engines, I don't want to see one more person being castigated for asking a question on social media that could have been answered with a cursory search.
That was shitty, asshole behavior to begin with and now it can't even be justified by being technically correct.
I don't mind customers cancelling their license for my #WordPress plugin, not even if they are not satisfied with the product any more but this cancellation reason made me a bit sad (it was for an art education site) ...
Most of these have not been publicly reported. According to @404mediaco: "The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and #security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally." Goes from 2013 to 2018.
Some of the incidents...
in 2016, a Google employee reported that Google Street View’s systems were transcribing and storing license plate numbers from photos.
public exposure of more than one million users’ email addresses from Socratic.org, a company that Google acquired.
a Google speech service logged all audio, including an estimated 1,000 childrens’ speech data, for around an hour.
A filter that was supposed to stop childrens’ voices from being collected was not correctly applied.
When iOS users of Google Drive or Docs set access controls on a file as “Anyone with the link,” Google actually treated it as a “Public” link.
This means, among other things, that uBlock Origin is about to be disabled in Chrome. Google will choose a different extension to recommend but it can not be as effective as #uBlock Origin.
Following #Google's example, may I instead recommend you switch to #Firefox.
Firefox will continue to support Manifest v2, and consequently uBlock Origin and other extensions that can not be implemented with Manifest v3.
Importantly, it touches not just on the value of the presence of #information from from election campaigns, it reflects on the (negative) value of the absence of information.
"[T]he US government is...trying to break up #Google, the largest #tech#company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it.
" #Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an #election based on the promise to prosecute an anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries."