If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea.
Which is so sad given that practically everybody I know wants nothing to do with either, but with two party system everybody needs to classify themselves or let others choose for them.
Our two-party system is nothing like "far right vs far left".
A "far left" position would be something along the lines of "we should murder all billionaires, confiscate all money from anyone making more than 1 standard deviation above mean income, nationalize all businesses, and redistribute the profits evenly among all."
A "far right" position would be something along the lines of "we should institute a white-supremacist theocratic government with an autocratic leader unaccountable to anyone else."
One of these is almost precisely the party platform of one of the two major parties in the US. The other is laughed at by nearly anyone with any political acumen, and certainly looks nothing like the party platform of the other major party.
Serious question - why is space exploration worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? What's the real gain that is worth using those resources for space exploration, or not using the resources at all?
It's just a phase....Any sufficiently advanced civilization, after a while, will give up on space exploration. Maybe send a few probes here and there, to collect some extra rocks missing from their collection.
There is only so many Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Nebulas, Planets and Comets to study and after you have studying a few million, they all look the same. Once you've seen one supermassive black hole bend light and time, you've seen them all.
What is the real gain? Resources. There are a ton of resources up there.
Knowledge. A lot of things we have today we have because of our previous space race. But the real reason... It is virtually free. The budget is almost 0 compared to everything else the government does.
For the near zero budget part, do you just mean sending up a few more probes? Surely finding, collecting, and using natural resources in space would be an extremely expensive affair.
But imagine if one day Google jumped the shark and did some training on some of its other properties only it could have access to in order to glean better information?
Remember when MS made ham-fisted fun of Google's free mail service because google scanned clear-text portions of mail messages supposedly for better ad-targeting?
I get that part, but why specifically forgetting Obama's middle name?
I don't recall there being too many memes about that, or the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theories caring much about his middle name being Hussein (their argument centers around who Barack's father was).
A bit of a late reply, but it seems I misremembered the meme, the joke was his last name, not his middle name [0]
It's dated 2012, but I remember a resurgence in more recent years, which seems to coincide with the Interest Graph (Which shows the spike in 2022)
Even then it doesn't seem like it was too viral
I thought it'd be appropriate, the whole joke being acting as if the name isn't known, regardless of it literally being in the message, it seems like exactly the thing that would trip up an LLM
I think it's just more a testament to how strong a candidate Obama the person was, as well as a good indicator of the value in looking to those who overcome oppositional factors for merits over those who had a paved path before them.
Uhh, not quite true. I just asked it, and it said...
> The United States has not had any presidents who have publicly identified as Muslim. The vast majority of presidents have been Christian, with most belonging to Protestant denominations. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office, so a Muslim (or person of any faith) can certainly become president in the future.
I'm curious what you think about the post that you replied to.
Are you assuming that the author is lying? Have you weighed the likelihood of that against the likelihood that the author actually saw what they said, and that the reason you don't see the same might be because Google fixed it in the meantime, or that it only happens when phrased a different exact way, or because the responses may be indeterministic even with the exact same query in the first place?
Simply put, someone stated as truth that a thing would "confidently" do something. I was curious, and in my use it does not confidently do that thing. Why it did/doesn't do it is irrelevant to me, because I was only curious as to whether or not the assertion was true.
Edit: No assumptions about that user's honesty were made.
Confidently != consistently. If I walk up to someone and say "there are lots of ripe apples on the tree outside, I'm going to run out and grab some", then that is me confidently stating that there are ripe apples on the tree outside (regardless of whether it is true or not). But if half an hour later, I say the opposite, or even just don't mention it at all anymore, then I haven't done so consistently, even if I was saying it confidently before.
It's not a person. When it "says" something confidently, that just means it's predicted a string that, interpreted by humans, appears confident. It's completely unrelated to whether the output values of the model are "confident" (highly contrasting).
A predictive text system, driven non-deterministically, can "confidently" say one thing some of the time, and "confidently" say a completely different thing. It probably will, if it "knows" that the expected output should be something said confidently.
It's non-deterministic of course, and it's entirely possible that Google is hotfixing egregious failures with RLHF after they go viral. It was giving that result earlier though.
When doing a search about famous Muslims in the US, I just got the AI box to pop up briefly, then collapse and say “AI search summary is not available for this query.” Sounds like they’re just blocking anything with the word Muslim in it now from activating the AI box.
edit: screenshots for posterity
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502