I was watching the RFK Jr questioning today and when Bernie was talking about healthcare and wages I felt he was the only one who gave a real damn. I also thought “Wow he’s kinda old” so I asked my phone how old he actually was. Gemini however, wouldnt answer a simple, factual question about him. What the hell? (The answer is 83 years old btw, good luck america)

  • jeeptrap@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 hours ago

    Google has implemented restrictions on Gemini’s ability to provide responses on political figures and election-related topics. This is primarily due to the potential for AI to generate biased or inaccurate information, especially in the sensitive and rapidly evolving landscape of politics. Here are some of the key reasons behind this decision:

    • Mitigating misinformation: Political discourse is often rife with misinformation and disinformation. AI models, like Gemini, learn from vast amounts of data, which can include biased or inaccurate information. By limiting responses on political figures, Google aims to reduce the risk of Gemini inadvertently spreading misinformation.
    • Avoiding bias: AI models can inherit biases present in their training data. This can lead to skewed or unfair representations of political figures and their viewpoints. Restricting responses in this area helps to minimize the potential for bias in Gemini’s output.
    • Preventing manipulation: AI-generated content can be used to manipulate public opinion or influence elections. By limiting Gemini’s involvement in political discussions, Google hopes to reduce the potential for its technology to be misused in this way.
    • Maintaining neutrality: Google aims to maintain a neutral stance on political matters. By restricting Gemini’s responses on political figures, they can avoid the appearance of taking sides or endorsing particular candidates or ideologies. While these restrictions may limit Gemini’s ability to provide information on political figures, they are in place to ensure responsible use of AI and to protect the integrity of political discourse.
  • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    12 hours ago

    This is absolutely a good thing. There’s enough misinformation out there, we don’t need people getting their news about politics from an algorithm that is used to generate text.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    15 hours ago

    This may be an unpopular opinion (though I doubt it), but I think this is good. I don’t want people making opinions about politics based on AI output. In the best case, it isn’t reliable. In the worst case, it’ll make things up and lead people to false conclusions. If you want the information then it’s out there. Don’t rely on LLMs to give accurate information, especially on current events.

    • wellheh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      13 hours ago

      Kinda difficult to have an AI with those restrictions because anything is politicized depending on your pov- just getting information and using science is considered politics in 2025. That said, AIs need to do a better job sourcing their info of people are using them to search so it’s at least traceable. Chances are most of this info is just from Wikipedia but they should do track it better

    • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 hours ago

      This doesn’t stop people from letting Gemini control their political opinion.

      But Google making Gemini not able to talk about progressivism definitely makes sure those political opinions won’t be progressive.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      13 hours ago

      Dunno if your typo was intentional or not, but all I see in this thread is that somehow a typo is a way to bypass whatever block they have on discussion related to political figures. Which is bonkers. The great minds at the Goog somehow missed a pretty obvious workaround.

  • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    22 hours ago

    Not just Bernie, it doesn’t reply to questions about trump either. I guess they don’t want the AI to reply to political questions with biased opinions from the internet, which is fair.

  • Robotunicorn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    That’s because Google is not only a shit company, it’s also in Trump’s pocket. They changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico for US users. WTF?

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    It looks like they disabled responses about current major political figures.

    • BatrickPateman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      24 hours ago

      As OP’s query regarding RFK Jr. yielded a response he can be considered “not a major political figure” then, I guess. Nice burn, Gemini 🤭.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      15 hours ago

      Especially something so trivial. If you use it to learn about some larger conflict or something, fine (though don’t expect accuracy). If you’re using for age, which has been trivial to find with a quick search for at least a decade, something has gone wrong with you. It’s the higher effort option for a worse result.

    • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 hours ago

      To see if it can do it and how accurate its general knowledge is compared to the real data. A locally hosted LLM doesnt leak private data to the internet.

      Most webpages and reddit post in search results are themselves full of LLM generated slop now. At this stage of the internet if your gonna consume slop one way or the other it might as well be on your own terms by self hosting an open weights open license LLM that can directly retrieve information from fact databases like wolframalpha, Wikipedia, world factbook, ect through RAG. Its never going to be perfect but its getting better every year.

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      To be honest, that seems like it should be the one thing they are reliably good at. It requires just looking up info on their database, with no manipulation.

      Obviously that’s not the case, but that’s just because currently LLMs are a grift to milk billions from corporations by using the buzzwords that corporate middle management relies on to make it seem like they are doing any work. Relying on modern corporate FOMO to get them to buy a terrible product that they absolutely don’t need at exorbitant contract prices just to say they’re using the “latest and greatest” technology.

      • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        To be honest, that seems like it should be the one thing they are reliably good at. It requires just looking up info on their database, with no manipulation.

        That’s not how they are designed at all. LLMs are just text predictors. If the user inputs something like “A B C D E F” then the next most likely word would be “G”.

        Companies like OpenAI will try to add context to make things seem smarter, like prime it with the current date so it won’t just respond with some date it was trained on, or look for info on specific people or whatnot, but at its core, they are just really big auto fill text predictors.

      • DrFistington@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, I still struggle to see the appeal of Chatbot LLMs. So it’s like a search engine, but you can’t see it’s sources, and sometimes it ‘hallucinates’ and gives straight up incorrect information. My favorite was a few months ago I was searching Google for why my cat was chewing on plastic. Like halfway through the AI response at the top of the results it started going on a tangent about how your cat may be bored and enjoys to watch you shop, lol

        So basically it makes it easier to get a quick result if you’re not able to quickly and correctly parse through Google results… But the answer you get may be anywhere from zero to a hundred percent correct. And you don’t really get double check the sources without further questioning the chat bot. Oh and LLM AI models have been shown to intentionally lie and mislead when confronted with inaccuracies they’ve given.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      I mostly can’t understand why people are so into “LLMs as a substitute for Web search”, though there are a bunch of generative AI applications that I do think are great. I eventually realized that for people who want to use their cell phone via voice, LLM queries can be done without hands or eyes getting involved. Web searches cannot.

          • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            21 hours ago

            The problem isn’t conducting the search with voice, it’s receiving any actual information back. A few years ago I would ask a question and receive an answer based off the top few results, and if it couldn’t scrape something together it would just give me the results instead.

            I haven’t used voice search in a while because of the issues that started to arise, but I have less fond memories of “hey Siri, answer this.” And then having to go find my phone anyway to Google it because she was useless

      • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        Because web search was intentionally hobbled by Google so people are pushed to make more searches and see more ads.

          • Nollij@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            0·
            23 hours ago

            DDG and Ecosia are proxies for Bing. I didn’t check, but I’m guessing the others are too. Most “independent” search engines are.

            The major exception is Startpage, which is a proxy for Google.

              • Nollij@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                0·
                21 hours ago

                That one’s pretty obvious. From their main page:

                Startpage delivers Google search results via our proprietary personal data protection technology.

          • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
            0·
            1 day ago

            Do any of them actually work? As in, you search something and it gives you relevant results to the whole thing you typed in?

            • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              1 day ago

              It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.

              Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.

              The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).

            • czl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              0·
              1 day ago

              I’ve used DuckDuckGo for a long time, so I would say yes. But the best way to figure that out is just to try it for a while. There is literally nothing to lose.

                • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  0·
                  11 hours ago

                  DDG really likes to give bullshit AI generated website results. “Top 7 [thing] to buy in 2025”. And after reading for 2 minutes, you realize the page is utter shit. Paragraphs of fluff, some referral links, and absolutely no expert advice.

      • Squorlple@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        Would saying “Gemini, open the Wikipedia page for Bernie Sanders and read me the age it says he is”, for example, suffice as a voice input that both bypasses subject limitations and evades AI bullshitting?

        • brb@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          23 hours ago

          Gemini refuses to answer

          Copilot seems to know the current date and calculates the age from that

          ChatGPT is clueless

        • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          23 hours ago

          Idk if it bypasses limitations, you can try. As for bullshiting, no. The AI almost certainly does not have the ability to go and open a webpage. If it was trained on wikipedia, it may give you the age listed at the time of it’s training. If not, it will likely take a different source and pretend it is from wikipedia. Either way, it will likely bullshit you about doing what you asked while giving you outdated/missourced information.

          Now the number may be correct, I imagine Bernies real age is readily available, but it will confidently lie about how it got the information.