Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social

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?”

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    177
    ·
    1 year ago

    when will people learn that search results change all the time and are different for different people

    • Sami@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      132
      ·
      1 year ago

      I get the same as the main post. Either way the point still stands. I had someone correct me with a misconception about something because he googled it and thats what it said in the answer box. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rely on search results especially when google synthesizes them into questions and answers with little context

      • cybervseas@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        56
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yes. I have to keep reminding my parents that those little Google answer boxes aren’t real search results and can’t be trusted. They sometimes say the exact opposite of the page they’re citing!

    • Neato@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      51
      ·
      1 year ago

      It doesn’t matter? If you search for something and you get a blatantly wrong answer parroted from an AI text completion service, it’s still a fail.

      I got the wrong answer from Google just now and I’ve never heard of that joke before. So clearly it isn’t just OP with polluted metrics.

      • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        I just tried it and got this result. The sentence is incredible, I can’t get over how painfully stupid it is.

        Apparently Kenya starts with a k sound and a letter that resembles k but not the letter k

    • OldFartPhil@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I get the result you got, but the Emergent Mind response is the second organic result. That’s still way too high.

    • Notorious_handholder@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Take out “the letter” part and search as just: “countries in africa that start with k”. For some reason it seems the search involving the words “the letter” got fixed but others did not. Confirmed I was able to get both results by doing that and as of this typing I still able to switch between the two results by just adding or removing those words

    • deleted@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Interestingly enough, when I removed the word “letter” I got none. If I put it back I get Kenya.

      This was done on the same device and same browser session.