Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

> Hassabis says that he’s learning more about introducing products and that Google’s product teams, in turn, are dealing with the novel challenges of generative AI, which has the potential to behave unusually when placed in the hands of the general public.

This part isn't rocket science.

Step 1) Post on 4chan and SomethingAwful "What is the worst thing you could do with genAI? Go."

Step 2) Test your beta product against all the answers you get.

View on HN

the tricky part with systems like these isn't to find and fix the worst things that people can come up with on 4chan because they're by definition obvious. The much trickier part is finding the little problems that way more people run into and that most people might not even immediately recognize or report.

And that is a very complicated science in particular with something that can be as fuzzy and intransparent as generative AI.

This has been going on since long before[1] the recent AI craze.

IMNSHO it seems Google just cannot miss an opportunity to mess up the basics in the quest for amazing and then fail at amazing or cancel it just as they are about to achieve it. And, ironically this has transformed their search engine from unbeatable leader in its field to something much closer to what it replaced.

[1]:This is from 5 years ago: https://erik.itland.no/more-fun-with-google-mixing-images-fr...

> the worst things that people can come up with on 4chan because they're by definition obvious

If they're finding your flag through star patterns and flying drones at it to set it on fire, I think they go a bit deeper than "obvious".

I think the challenge is you can't QA every edge case, because there's unlimited edge cases.

There's also a standard distribution that most people will think of.

"Generate photos of Nazis" wouldn't have been my first use, but in retrospect it does seem like something that of course The Internet is going to try.

That Google didn't even identify that sort of low-hanging fruit as a QA case is what points to a process in need of external input.

The Control Problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com