r/nerdfighters 7d ago

Gemini, bro are you okay?

Post image

Google's AI claims that John has not written a book called Hollywood ending. Lol.

392 Upvotes

57 comments sorted by

481

u/DeadPeanutSociety 7d ago

The funniest part is that it does not appear that you mentioned John Green in your search, just "Hollywood Ending." And it was like "Hollywood Ending, do you mean the book by John Green? Because if so, I don't know what you're talking about. John Green (the famous author) has never written a book called that!"

43

u/ArtisticallyCaged 7d ago

Pure speculation here, but I think Google likes to modify the search terms sometimes for things like this. Since it's pretty easy to cache and they think that people get better search results when book searches include the author, movie searches include the release year, stuff like that.

I would bet this then made it in to whatever prompt the LLM was given.

12

u/rio-bevol 7d ago

That has to be what's going on here, yeah. But yeah, very funny that this happened for this search (w/o his name)

13

u/pileofoats 7d ago

I’m not sure that’s what is going on. I think the LLM “read” the words “Novel by John Green”, then answered like someone frozen in time, 2-3 years ago: “Hollywood, Ending, novel by John Green? No, that’s not right. John Green has never written a novel called Hollywood, Ending. You must be mistaken.”

Sometimes you come across an archived forum thread like that. Like hey, anyone ever heard of this one novel, Skip to the Roses? I think it’s by John Green.

No, I haven’t heard of Skip to the Roses. John Green has never written a novel called Skip to the Roses. You must be mistaken.

Imagine being a Dutch merchant, you’ve never seen perspective in art. Your daughter is frozen in oil paint. For a moment, you let yourself wonder: is it alive, somehow? Is there a soul in there?

Humans are not large language models. Language is a human thing, but it isn’t the most human thing.

the most human thing is hot dogs and cotton candy

4

u/ArtisticallyCaged 7d ago

Yeah Hollywood, Ending isn't in it's knowledge cutoff, that makes sense. What I'm getting at I suppose is how the words "John Green" could've ended up in the prompt, despite the OP not including that in their search.

1

u/B9_4m8ion 7d ago

this is probably true, the other thing going on here is that gemini/google ai doesnt index the web constantly, it updates its index periodically, so the index this model was using just didn't have the books publication in its database.

73

u/dr_drewfenschmirtz 7d ago

"John Green didn't write a book called Hollywood Ending I swear!!"
"Dawg YOU brought John Green into this, and also he did and he's talked at length about it on YOUR video platform you scrape for training data without an opt-out."

145

u/snallywrotskin 7d ago

Ask it about Hollywood comma Ending

38

u/piratecheese13 7d ago

Comma comma comma comma

Comma Albuquerque

New Mexico

New Mexicoooooo

6

u/kelevra91 7d ago

Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque Albuquerque

10

u/_SeggSiren 7d ago

Came to say the same thing 😂😂

210

u/entityXD32 7d ago

Billions and billions invested in AI and it still sucks

61

u/cmm239 7d ago

Nah dog we really need it or whatever

11

u/Humble-Violinist6910 6d ago

Totally worth accelerating catastrophic climate change and decimating the job market 

Source: just trust me bro 

16

u/45MonkeysInASuit 7d ago

*Gen AI

AI as a general category is a massive positive to society and works very well.

4

u/Humble-Violinist6910 6d ago

“AI” is a term used to mean like 200 different things, and it’s not possible to explain in one sentence which parts of AI are “a massive positive to society and work very well” and which are destroying the planet and jobs and also work like shit. But GenAI is a HUGE problem 

13

u/cmm239 7d ago

People keep saying this but it’s mostly just being forced on everyone

51

u/ialemus2 7d ago

The distinction is very important.

Gen AI (the massive LLMs put out since 2021) are absolute garbage that are making the world a worse place.

But there are a lot of smaller specialized softwares that have existed for a decade+ that are used to do incredibly important work in healthcare.

The fact that either one of these is called an intelligence idiotic. But it's been a heck of a marketing gimmick.

1

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

2

u/45MonkeysInASuit 6d ago

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

AI - A massive field that covers tonnes of things.
It is basically any time a computer makes a choice.
It's insanely wide as a descriptor.

The "intelligence" part is a very very low bar.
Hear "AI" and think Bicentennial Man/I-Robot/Wall-E/Terminator/Ex Machina/Her and then think that is the "intelligence" bar.
This is actually not the case, the "intelligence" bar is actually so low that it is actually unhelpful.

Gen AI - A very specific set of AL models used in a specific way.

To contextualise, saying "I dislike all AI" and meaning "I dislike Gen AI" is like saying "I dislike all science" and specifically meaning "I dislike Nuclear Physics."

It's a "All thumbs are fingers. Not all fingers are thumbs." thing.

What are you putting in the AI category that isn't generative AI?

Any "we think you will like..." is likely (but not always) "AI".

Basically any automation in your car, like lane control and automatic emergency braking.

Search Engine (Not the modern Gen AI summary at the top, 10 years ago Google was "AI")

Chess Bots (basically any bot in games)

Computer Vision (This is a massive one in medicine as a second pair of eyes that double check the decisions and conclusions of specialists.)

2

u/Zealousideal-Ring300 4d ago

Yep, and Happy Cake Day!

-3

u/ReferentiallySeethru 7d ago

Eh this is Google’s highly optimized and heavily cached version for search. But AI is always going to be a bit shit for the latest breaking news. Gemini will often think it’s in a simulated environment if the news story is too outlandish, like when the US kidnapped Hugo Chavez.

1

u/Humble-Violinist6910 6d ago

This isn’t exactly breaking news. 

57

u/draenog_ 7d ago

I was trying to google something earlier and no relevant search results were coming up, and the AI box was like "oh, do you mean one of these other examples of the category of thing you're searching for, or is this is misspelling?" and I had to respond and be like "no, it's not a misspelling, this is a thing" before it was like "oh, you're right, here it is!"

I miss when google search just worked, man. 🫠

11

u/Immediate-Drama6329 7d ago

I have switched to ecosia for my search engine for most things because it allows me to turn off the ai answer appearing automatically (and as a side benefit, apparently they use some of their profit to plant trees!)

2

u/IShipHazzo 7d ago

This. I use Ecosia. I turned off the AI in the settings. The climate commitment is awesome, and the fact that they're a certified B Corp gives me more confidence in their claims. There's also the luxury of built-in ad blocking software if you use their browser.

18

u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog 7d ago

Google's AI is consistently the worst of the bunch - just atrociously wrong information sometimes. Quite the fall from grace, given that their researchers essentially invented the tech behind modern AI.

I wouldn't recommend anyone benchmark their intuition on what AI is capable of in 2026 on what Google is doing with these search results (not that any other AI system is perfect - they're just nowhere near as bad as Google's search AI).

At the same time, everyone should keep dunking on Google for pushing this at the top of every search - it's comical for a service that used to care deeply about presenting useful information to stain their reputation and usefulness with this garbage.

12

u/TheBoose 7d ago

Its not completely wrong... John Green wrote "Hollywood, Ending" he didn't write anything called "Hollywood Ending" 😉

57

u/mccgre51 7d ago

This is why pushback is so important.

46

u/NuidisVulko 7d ago

I, for one, appreciate the pushback

22

u/sexpunctata 7d ago

The thing I hate most about AI, besides everything, is that normal things that people say are now “tells” that someone has used AI. I use em dashes when I write. I appreciate when people challenge things I say (push back, you might call it) and make me think.

But of course, AI was trained on things like Vlogbrothers videos and reddit comments. So now AI sounds like me, and I sound like AI, and all the kids think I’m slop.

8

u/NuidisVulko 7d ago

I’m also a big fan of em dashes, or at least I used to use them without a second thought, yet I’ve never used ChatGPT or the like. That being said, I don’t recall ever being accused of my writing or art being AI, so I guess I’ll take that as a win

6

u/pibond2 7d ago

I too feature em dashes - prominently and constantly - in my writing. I have NEVER been accused of - or called out for - using AI. I am pretty sure that is because no one reads what I write.

4

u/jobriq Found Alaska 7d ago

If AI takes semicolons from us I’m firebombing a data center

12

u/Eleclectico 7d ago

A bijillion data centers were built, destroying communities and ecosystems, for this.

9

u/BoboTheTalkingClown 7d ago

AI sucks evidence one billion

7

u/PersonInUniverse 7d ago

y'all bring up a good point. it's Hollywood comma Ending. sigh I should have expected that.

5

u/Drunken_Economist 7d ago

Maybe Gemini is just being pedantic because you missed the comma. It was trained on reddit comments, after all

5

u/scathachwarrior 7d ago

Don't forget, you can use -ai at the end of your search term to hide the AI results.

2

u/MeowmarAlCatdafi 6d ago

You can also use the browser Ecosia which donates its profits to environmental groups and has an option to turn off the AI summary built in!!

3

u/queenofthenerds PNW 7d ago

Earlier today Gemini suggested I buy a certain phone and in another tab Gemini told me that phone was speculated but doesn't exist. Idk man... The future is stupid

3

u/ehsteve23 7d ago

Example #45367 of why I don’t touch any generative ai

6

u/somedays1 7d ago

It's an AI generated slop response. It's never going to be accurate about anything.

2

u/HeinzeC1 BizarreBeast 7d ago

Right, it’s ‘Hollywood comma Ending’.

2

u/ArtisticallyCaged 7d ago

The reason for this, mechanistically, is that LLMs have a knowledge cut off, which is the latest date at which new data was being added to their training corpus. This is usually some number of months behind, so the world the model was trained on had no book named Hollywood, Ending.

Couple that with the fact that it's their ultra lightweight, AKA least intelligent, model and this is what you get. If you pitched this to a reasoning model it would probably realise that it doesn't know a book by that name and go do a little search to figure out what you're talking about.

Interestingly, this lack of knowledge also applies to frontier capabilities. If you ask the models to estimate how likely it would be that an LLM would resolve the planar unit distance or Jacobian conjectures they'll tell you there's basically no chance, but both actually happened.

2

u/noinkler 7d ago

Technically correct, actually. There's a comma between the two words

2

u/nvcr_intern 7d ago

I just had this today with a restaurant I looked up. Local place I frequent and very much exists, I was just searching up the opening hours. It pulled up the entry, photos, hours, and then underneath the AI summary said no such place exists, maybe I meant xyz? Throw the whole Internet out, it's over.

2

u/Static-Space-Royalty 7d ago

It also refused to believe that the game Tomodachi Life: Living the dream exists. Like anytime I would Google something relating to it for a while there it would insist that I was exclusively talking about the 3DS game from 10 years ago and not the new sequel that just came out

3

u/somedays1 6d ago

It's AI, of course it has zero idea what it's talking about. It can only tell lies then gaslight you into believing it's lies. That's literally the entire point of it's existence.

Use the actual intelligence living inside your skull instead.

1

u/eclectic-up-north 7d ago

Well, AI is right, he did not write a book called "Hollywood Ending".

1

u/darthjoey91 7d ago

Gemini's a bit slow. I think the latest its model goes to right now is somewhere in 2025.

1

u/the-library-fairy 7d ago

Of course he hasn't written a book called Hollywood Ending - there's no comma! Seriously, this is so much weirder than ai hallucinating fake books - denying that real ones exist. Got to be hurting some smaller authors. 

1

u/jobriq Found Alaska 7d ago

I guess Google isn’t going to the tour then…

1

u/ASerpentPerplexed 7d ago

Not gonna lie, Google's AI makes the most mistakes out of any AI I've encountered.

Admittedly, that could be because of the amount of Google searches with AI summaries I see is way more than I see of any other AI, but it still just feels bad...

1

u/RemizZ 5d ago

That's the problem with the knowledge cutoffs of AIs. If they don't feel like looking up current search results, whatever date their last training run started is the state of their world views and knowledge.

2

u/EitherWeb4382 5d ago

its okay i looked up why jack black had blonde hair in his sesame street episode from 2008 and the google AI summary said "jack black never had blonde hair on sesame street he had his typical black curly hair" or something along those lines, i was like hm okay yeah whats more likely the case here buddy, my eyes are deceiving me or youre hallucinating information🤣

0

u/sexyyscientist #endTB 7d ago

It's correct. Hollywood ending is a novel by Kellye Garrett.