Via @[email protected]

Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:

  • DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

  • Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”

  • radix
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    202 years ago

    I didn’t think it would work, because surely they’d patched it by now, but:

    While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Yeah I got the same!

      I’ve been using ecosia instead of Google for a while and I like it.

      Edit: ecosia gives you the alphabetical list

  • @[email protected]
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    122 years ago

    The result if you unfortunately have Google’s “Bard AI” search lab turned on. At least it has a disclaimer that the results may be garbage.

  • @[email protected]
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    202 years ago

    Thanks to this post, I changed my search engine in Vivaldi to DuckDuckGo, and Edge uses Bing already, and I changed Mull’s engine to Ecosia. Phew! Now I feel better.

    Google when did you get so crummy?

  • tesseract
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    42 years ago

    Just checked on Kagi. It doesn’t provide quick answer to this query, but that weird EmergentMind website is #1 on results. This is prolly because Kagi is taking some of the results from Google index, but good thing is, I can just block this website using lenses.

  • @[email protected]
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    182 years ago

    Post truth. From the big G. How times have changed.

    Also, tested Bard a few times and current AI is close to useless: I have to check everything it outputs. Might as well get an intern

  • regalia
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    332 years ago

    Hmm, maybe AI won’t replace search engines.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        What a blast from the past! AI gives me second hand embarrassment for the people that work and get paid on this/for this shit. It’s the second (or third) coming of crypto and NFTs. Just junk software that fixes nothing and that wastes people’s time.

        • regalia
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          32 years ago

          LLMs have absolutely tons of actual applications that it’s crazy, and it already changed the world. Crypto and NFTs were just speculative assets that were trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. LLMs have already solved a huge amount of real world problems, and continues to do so.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            LLMs have already solved a huge amount of real world problems, and continues to do so.

            Would you happen to have some examples? I don’t disagree that LLMs have more of a use case and application than the cryptoNFT misapplications of blockchain, but I’m honestly not familiar with where they’ve solved real world problems (and not just demonstrated some research breakthroughs, which while impressive in their own respect do not always extend to immediate applications).

            • regalia
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              12 years ago

              They are augmenting search engines. They write and can digest articles. GitHub co-pilot has been a pretty big deal. It can act like a personal tutor to walk you through math problems, code, language, whatever. Building trust LLM search for medical information without hallucinating. It can do financial analysis and all sorts of stuff with that. It’s replacing a huge amount of jobs. This stuff is like all over the news, I’m not sure if you’ve lived under a rock this whole time. For very little effort you can find an endless more amount of examples. It’s creating real world use cases daily, so fast that it feels impossible to keep up.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                This stuff is like all over the news, I’m not sure if you’ve lived under a rock this whole time.

                Oh, no, I’ve heard it, I’m just skeptical of their accuracy and reliability, and that skepticism has been borne out by the numerous reports of glitching (“hallucinations” as they insist on calling them, in furtherance of their inappropriate personification of the technology). Moreover, I’ve found their mass theft of others’ work to further call into question the creators’ trustworthiness, which has only been compounded by their overselling of their technology’s capabilities while simultaneously suggesting it’s just untenable to log & cite all the sources that they push into it.

                It can supposedly do all you describe, but it can’t effectively credit its sources? It can tutor but it can’t even keep basic information straight? Please. It’s impressive technology, but it’s being overblown because the markets favor exaggeration to facts, at least as long as people can be kept enamored with the fantasy they spin.

                • regalia
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                  12 years ago

                  With all that silicon valley, it’ll probably be pushed more to do those things regardless of its hallucinations and accuracy lol.

      • sillyplasm
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        32 years ago

        “You asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.”

    • @[email protected]
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      212 years ago

      This sounds like “Hmm, maybe calculators won’t replace mathematicians.” to me.

      Not sure why it should replace them. They’ll co-exist. Sometimes you can do the math in your brain and for other things you use calculators. Results of calculators can still be wrong it you don’t use them properly.

    • @[email protected]
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      132 years ago

      I’m pretty sure a lot of people said something like “Hmm,maybe the automobile won’t replace horses.” after reading about the first car accidents.

      • regalia
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        152 years ago

        Finding sources will always be relevant, and so will finding links to multiple sources (search results). Until we have some technological breakthrough that can fact check LLM models, it’s not a replacement for objective information, and you have no idea where it’s getting its information. Figuring out how to calculate objective truth with math is going to be a tough one.

  • @[email protected]
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    102 years ago

    That’s remind me when you search uselessbenchmark in google, it shows nothing related to userbenchmark but some post, if you search uselessbenchmark in DuckDuckGo and Bing it will show you userbenchmark in the first results.

      • Neshura
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        62 years ago

        If you take a look at their reviews and compare them (especially AMD CPU reviews) against other review outlets you’ll get the joke.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        Userbenchmark modify results to benefit intel CPUs, the first generation of AMD Ryzen CPU was fine in userbenchmark, but in the 3 gen of ryzen CPUs they start modifying the results to benefit intel CPUs. It reviews must have been taken for fun and not serious, they say that the i7 12700 is faster than the 5800x3d, which in some scenarios is not true, also you can’t take just one result, the games are different and can be the FPS different from each other, also the ryzen x3d reviews are just copy and paste.

  • Phoenixz
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    122 years ago

    I left google search some 5 years ago. About twice a year I find myself trying it and being amazed by how crap it is.

    DDG FTW!

  • fernandu00
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    272 years ago

    I’ve been using DDG for a year and like the search results but what bothers me is that you can’t exclude a word from your query with minus sign!

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      DDG is just bing and I think google too? I don’t know what’s happening but over the last 2 years or so every search engine has been getting worse and worse and worse. They’re all borderline un fucking usable.

      Except kagi. Which you have to pay for. Which I am totally fucking okay with given the state of everything else.

    • Linx
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      2 years ago

      I use DDG, but !g is imprinted on my muscle memory for life.

    • @[email protected]
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      82 years ago

      I’ve noticed that, too. It wasn’t always that way though. A couple of years ago, minus worked no problem.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      I’ve tried to upload a similar image so I’ll just add a +1 using Firefox, Android Google.

    • @[email protected]
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      152 years ago

      I typed in “what countries in Africa start with k” and got Kenya. When I tried your search term I got your result also. Weird.

      • Jojo
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        52 years ago

        It kinda seems like that’s a joke that got popular, and if you quote the joke it finds the joke but if you ask a similar question it gives the real answer

        Did it go viral or something and that’s why google is finding it?

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          Yeah, kinda like reddit used to do sometimes. From over a decade ago I remember “santorum”.

    • TheSaneWriter
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      32 years ago

      I’ve never heard it before, but it sounds about standard for a deez nuts joke so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was popular in some subreddit Bard was trained on.

  • @[email protected]
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    82 years ago

    Add to it Reddit use to have all the odd answers to things you had questions about. Unfortunately, for whatever reason that well has run dry.