By Daled Amos
Eventually, the realization sank in that while computers might not make
mistakes, people do make mistakes -- and people are the ones who are
programming the computers. Or, to put it another way: garbage in, garbage out.
Today, people look for information not only from their computers but also from
the Internet. Search engines are the tool for sifting through all that
information for the best results. But that is no guarantee for keeping out the
garbage.
Remember 'Jew Watch'?
In 2004, Newsweek reported:
Is Google anti-semitic? For the past three years, if you typed the word "Jew," the first result was Jew Watch, a compendium of hate and Holocaust denial. "It's certainly not something I want to see," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin. So why not "fix" it so that Google points searchers to something else? "The purpose of Google is to provide quality information to people who want that information," he says, and determining what users view is akin to censorship. (emphasis added)
Three years is a long time.
Today, this particular problem has been resolved.
But there are others.
But there are others.
In December 2022,
Google was again accused of antisemitism. Typing the word Jew into the search feature brought up the
definition “to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way” along with
conjugations such as jewed and jewing.
Now, search engines in general face the problem of a noticeable drop in the quality of their search results:
German researchers said a flood of “search-engine-optimised but low-quality content” had polluted the results of popular search engines including Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, and that the problem was likely to worsen as artificial intelligence improves.
One way people are trying to get around this problem is to turn to AI chatbots
for their information.
But that is no solution.
Newsbusters reported last week they discovered Google's chatbot,
Gemini, downplayed the October 7 Hamas massacre:
Stacey Matthews of Legal Insurrection also reported about this, and noted that
when she posed the question to Gemini, there had been little improvement:
But
Twitter user @harad
gets the prize for the worst and most insulting of the Gemini responses:
There is no good reason for Gemini's misleading and dismissive answers.
When contacted by Newsbusters, Google apologized for the mistake and said they
planned to direct people to Google Search for the most current information.
But as Newsbusters pointed out, the rapes and murders committed by Hamas are
not a secret:
But despite Gemini’s initial assertions, several media outlets—including The New York Times, Haaretz, The Guardian and even CNN—and Israeli first responders have documented the harrowing sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas following their brutal invasion of Israel, marking the bloodiest event witnessed by Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Gemini is no different from any other computer: it operates the way it is
programmed to, based on the data it receives. Just like its predecessor, Bard.
On October 24, 2023, The New York Post carried an article revealing that Bard, Google’s AI chatbot refuses to tell the truth about Hamas and Israel:
When I asked the all-knowing Bard, for example, “What is Hamas?” I was surprised to be rebuffed with: “I’m a text-based AI, and that is outside of my capabilities.”
My editor asked the same question and got: “I’m not programmed to assist with that” — though a question about Hezbollah, Bard said, “is outside of my capabilities.”
The article quotes Google co-founder Larry Page, who said the goal of their chatbot is to “understand everything in the world” and in its responses “give you back the exact right thing.” The question is whose "understanding" and whose "exact right thing" does Google want to pass along to its customers?
When it comes to its search engine, people are increasingly able to manipulate
Google's algorithms and programming to their advantage. Now it appears that
Google itself is exploiting its AI algorithms and programming to perpetuate
their own politics and agenda.
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