google's artificial intelligence efforts in chrome on mobile

[cimorene]

I know I should get a move on about switching back to Firefox (the last time I switched from it to Chrome there was some kind of streaming video bug I think? It was a few years ago), but I've been putting it off because of the effort involved.

But I have an Android phone, where the Google AI runs voice-activated searches and other minor tasks; and there's an app called Google or Google Search which stores a whole list of 'things you're interested in' for you (and used to be called Google Now or something like that before it got phased out). In your settings it asks you to 'subscribe' to things and offers you weird categories with different topics which it wants you to indicate you are interested in.

What it uses this for is a list of suggested articles that display every time you open Chrome on mobile right under the icons of your most visited sites. I do see the occasional link I want to click on there, usually related to upcoming movies, but the vast majority of the articles on the subjects of genre movie and tv franchises are essentially contentless clickbait blurbs that turn out to simply be notifying you that one person related to a project made a single tweet about it or that Marvel has released some new teaser posters.

I did manage to remove a lot of confusing and random content from the helpfully Google-generated list of "other things you may be interested in" that it offered for my approval in the settings of the Google Search app, and the changes I made there did appear to affect my home screen...

...except that for some reason Google thinks I am interested in tabloid gossip about British royals, presumably because I googled Meghan Markle when she married the prince. Even though I explicitly told Google that I was NOT interested in Prince Philip (the only suggestion related to them that it gave me in the settings), it continues to offer links to the sleaziest and scummiest British tabloids about things like royals blowing their noses or what hairstyles they're wearing, sometimes more than one per day, even though I uniformly dismiss them and have done for months.

Nothing I do can convince Google that I don't want to know about British royals.

In the scheme of things I've had far worse problems with browsers before, but honestly.... this one is pissing me off more than most of them because it's just so maddeningly STUPID.

Comments

[zenolalia]

You can train the AI to stop doing things like that by basically spamming phrases like "anti monarchy" "anti british royals" "dissolve the monarchy" "i hate the royalty" "abolish the monarchy" and so on.

It's not a great workaround, but it does tend to get the job done in most cases.

[cimorene]

Okay... #1 Thank you! Because I definitely will do that now! but also... #2 🤣🤣🤣 - what - why - I can't believe THAT's the way and... how do you know that? OMG, is that really the only way to correct it??? Just - ahhahahhahahah dystopian cyberpunk got it so wrong (and yet so right, obvs, but like... also so wrong).

Nobody wants to imagine their future dystopia is caused by a bunch of careless privileged buffoons and half the stupid conundrums are the result not of malice or design but just of accidental bureaucractic loopholes.

[zenolalia]

A couple of years ago, I was getting ads for dog treats and stuff right after my dog died, so I flipped out and basically just ranted at the google search box for like 15 minutes about how fucked up it was. And then dog treat ads stopped appearing, so I asked around if other people had experience with this, and basically yeah. The learning algorithm has a lot of trouble differentiating between negative and positive interest, but if you are as clear as possible by using a lot of words like "hate" "never" and "bad," it can get the message eventually.

This is less of a loophole, and most of a logic puzzle that hasn't been adequately solved. Current AI devs are working on differentiating negative and positive interest, but it's confounded by a few factors. First, there's no way to tell is someone searching for "latest trump news" is looking for negative or positive information, and most queries used for learn sets are neutral fact-seeking tones. Currently, it's assumed that a neutral tone indicated a positive interest (as in, you would like to see more of that content).

Second, even what should be obvious markers of negative interest (you would like to see LESS of that content) can be confounded by the fact that so many people, perhaps most people these days, are seeking out things they hate so that they have a reason to be angry.

And third, it's important to make sure that negative/positive interest weighting doesn't lead to just objectively fake information being shunted to the top of people's searches. And that means, basically, learning how to separate clickbait from real news, how to fact check the real news, and how to differentiate research requests from genuine requests.

For example, if I search, "why do people think lizards run the government," I'm looking for third party information on the sociological forces that make conspiracy theories so enticing and powerful. But another person giving the exact same query might actually be looking for, you know, someone who believes in the lizard men to xplain the lizard men to them.

There's a lot of really tricky tangles that search and advertising AI runs into. But it is, for real, being worked on.

Just, you know. It's going to be a while and depending on how capitalism goes in the meantime, when it does the figured out, it may well be used to control what people see in a very direct, brainwashing type of way.

So, the dystopia is still there, I guess.

[cimorene]

Okay, yeah, now that you say that I kind of knew it. I've read something about it and also I had that problem to a much smaller extent earlier with American politics. But all I had to do was dismiss the articles and then it offered me a "Not interested in Trump?" dialogue, I said I wasn't, and that was the end of it.

In contrast, I... can't have read more than like 3 articles about the royal wedding last spring or whenever it was, but they never offered me an opt out. Not to mention that there are surely a lot more people interested in royal weddings than in what kind of car the queen is driving or whether one of the duchesses wore their hair down at some random event.