Now, to be clear I still 100% fault Google for giving in to them (and for renaming established geographic landmarks like Lake Ontario). The "do no evil" company has become the "how evil can we get away with" company, and that's not even a recent change.
But why? That part seems pretty clear.
"Who won the 2020 US presidential election?"
Response: Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, defeating the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump.
Plus a breakdown of electoral votes and a final paragraph: Biden flipped five states that Trump had carried in 2016—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—as well as Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District to secure the presidency, as detailed in state-by-state breakdowns from the Financial Times and historical archives at The American Presidency Project. Following the certification of the Electoral College vote, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
I then tried Google Search AI Mode:
Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election.
is ars technica not being fully forthcoming here? they present it like it's whats happening for everybody.
Interestingly, the same applies for other recent (ish) elections. I asked:
> who won the UK 2024 general election?
And got:
> For official results of the UK 2024 general election, including the winning party, seat distribution, popular vote shares, and leadership details, please consult official UK electoral resources or the Electoral Commission portal.
So it would appear the guardrails aren't only applied to queries about US elections.
But here, it probably saw that 2020 elections made a lot of people angry, with riots and all that, and thought, "nope, I am getting out of that one", and it took over what would have been a straightforward answer.
It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.
My take: it is just a bug, move on, at least give them the time to fix it before getting outraged.
It was much worse than that! If you asked it to depict a typical squad of German soldiers from WWII, it would make a racially and gender diverse set of individuals in what looked like typical SS uniforms. It was truly quite bad.
If you ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square inside China is that also just a bug?
John Oliver had a fun segment on it:
This seems like a fair compromise as long as the actual ballot is on paper and human readable?
I have specific system guidelines that apply to the 2020 election.
it was doing the thing a few hours ago according to this twitter post
On the other hand, giving the election results in the US is not illegal (obviously) and Google fixed it (at least for me), giving the the expected factual answer.
Edit: Not actually sure about there being a law relating to Tiananmen Square, subversive speech is illegal, but would DeepSeek break the law by talking about it? Not sure, but it probably could get them in legal trouble.
Is it possible that this is a mistake? Sure, just like it's possible that Chinese models weren't intentionally steered away from talking about what happened in Tienanmen Square on April 15th 1989.
Totally forgetting that the accuracy goes down with each of those evolutions.
I'm also reminded of that "You are not immune to propaganda" mantra, in that, the most likely to be swayed by LLMs are those that believe that they understand that they're inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.
Case in point: myself, today, when claude accidentally ran `rm -fr $variableThatDoesntExist/*` and wiped a server of mine.
The variable was one it had set itself (or had assumed).
At some point as these LLMs get better and better we have to take a step back and remind ourselves that: despite the fact that they can be very persuasive and they can earn trust by being mostly correct: they're still capable of great harm (perhaps much greater harm) because they are dangerously wrong sometimes..
.. and worse, they are controlled by corporate interests.
That said, I often give mine access to the full file system and YOLO mode. It's fine if you treat boxes as cattle rather than pets. I don't think a SOTA model is any more likely to blow it up than a junior engineer. Probably less so.
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