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Comment by vagabund | Hacker News Reader

You'd think the experience of ChatGPT would have taught them that the average person isn't blindly worshipping the output of LLMs, and has the requisite critical thinking skills to keep the useful bits and discard the rest. Instead we get this belittling rebuttal highlighting the immense danger of letting the public use a service that may, occasionally, be wrong, as though humans don't encounter and discriminate incorrect information throughout every day of their lives (not least on google's own existing services). Instead of pontificating about "earning the public trust", maybe stop positioning yourself as the unassailable source of truth and give people tools that will materially improve their lives today, if you really want to follow through on your mission.

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I do think they sort of have a point... (lay) people are used to engaging critical thinking when using computers for interactions with other people.

They aren't used to thinking about computers own output in this sort of fuzzy way as it's not been a problem until recently... I can't see how my parents could suddenly conceptualise the whole idea that their computer may be lying to them or is confidently confused and wrong.

I submit that people could learn, provided the model output is framed appropriately. It does come across as rather patronizing from Google. Little wonder given the company’s DNA. Also just very risk averse, which goes without saying.

Maybe this article was written by a Google AI. I don’t see an author listed.

> You'd think the experience of ChatGPT would have taught them that the average person isn't blindly worshipping the output of LLMs

They aren't wrong though. Imagine Google had released LLM based chatbot first. There'd be a lot of negative coverage when (not just if) things went wrong: biases, inaccuracy, misinformation, dangerous information. With Google, people would expect to see "correct" information, and for it to not be biased, and safe.

for example, imagine if Google's bot give the recipe to make meth [1]. Every big publisher would be talking about dangers of AI, and how Google is being irresponsible. It's not just Google, you could replace Google with Microsoft and it would still apply.

With ChatGPT, it is a beta service, so users understand it can be wrong. Turn it into a product from another company and it becomes a liability issue.

[1] https://techreport.com/software/3488894/chatgpt-breaks-bad-a...

It seems as though you've conflated the management of perception with the practice of ethical research.

Google is very rich and that enables them to control resources and build things that make them richer. They're in positive feedback loop, and their job is to protect their advantage. Yep, sometimes capitalism gets out of hand.

It's the government's job (on behalf of their citizens) to apply the brakes, and Google has become pretty skilled at managing perceptions to avoid the brakes and maintain their advantage. This document is one part of their strategy.

So, apologizing for Google on the grounds of "they'd get bad press if they shared their toys" rings a bit hollow. They've dressed up self interest as social responsibility, and exploited this weird, radical left wing moment of ours to their advantage.

I think Google is hobbled by this belief. They place their "ethics" above doing well in the market. This is evidenced by the degradation of their search results to prevent the spread of misinformation. Because of this they dropped most results that come from forums from their search results. The market will just have to correct them. They are even saying they might stop releasing research because they are worried about the ethics of their competitors. That will just be a disaster for technology. No wonder Sergei and Larry aren't that excited about the company anymore.

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