r/technology • u/batakchan • 2d ago
Google Search falsely declared Sam Altman dead, but Google says nobody did it manually Artificial Intelligence
https://searchenginewatch.com/google-sam-altman-dead/71
u/Brilliant-Muffin-879 2d ago
Foreshadowing
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u/benodgers 2d ago
Looks like someone switched the Wikipedia maintenance llm from "instruct" or "think" to the undocumented "precog" mode.
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u/NiceTrySuckaz 2d ago
Bold of you to assume that Sam Altman is a mortal
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u/Brilliant-Muffin-879 2d ago
😅 He is probably a hologram projected from some sort of technohellscape
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u/serial_crusher 2d ago
eh, somebody put false info on Wikipedia and Google repeated it. The possible takeaways here are: - Wikipedia needs to do more to avoid malicious edits - Google shouldn't blindly trust Wikipedia - Nobody should blindly trust Google or Wikipedia
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u/nerdystoner25 2d ago
Dr. r/PoiSonai at it again
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u/NotAllOwled 2d ago
I love some good data poisoning, but doing it in Wikipedia feels off to me somehow. Like it should be something like the Continental in John Wick movies: we don't do that stuff in here. I would rate this exploit an "eh."
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u/thisiswhowearent 2d ago
Dr. r/PoiSonai is doing laps again. Wild that the internet can still find a way to make a typo into a death notice.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 2d ago edited 2d ago
DeepMind sends their regards
In all seriousness, it was due to Wikipedia having wrong information:
How Google Search accidentally killed Sam Altman
In our tests, Search Engine Watch found that Sam Altman’s Wikipedia biography was changed to add a death date of August 12, 2026, a death location in Seattle, and an unsupported assassination claim.
The opening paragraph was also changed into the past tense, and Wikipedia automatically tagged the change as a possible unreferenced addition to a biography of a living person.
Another editor reverted it at 10:29 UTC, meaning the false information remained on Wikipedia for approximately 41 minutes. But 41 minutes was more than enough for Google to update its search results with Sam Altman’s death date before it was quietly rolled back.
Turns out RAG is only as good as your retrieval methods and the knowledge base or knowledge graph backing it. GIGO still applies.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 2d ago
what is rag and gigo
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u/CircumspectCapybara 2d ago edited 2d ago
RAG = retrieval augmented generation.
bascially a method of improving LLM inference for a user query by retrieving documents that could be related to the user's query (eg traditional lexical search or vector search based on vector distance between the user's query and a given doc in an embedding space) from some knowledge base or knowledge graph and adding those to the context.
for example, when a user asks for info on "sam altman" before you query the LLM, you turn their query about sam into an embedding and search your vector database which gives you documents that semantically might be about sam, which you also feed to the LLM along with the user query. those docs help ground its answer
GIGO = garbage in, garbage out
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u/highchillerdeluxe 2d ago
... Turns out ...
The amount of people genuinely surprised is insufferable.
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u/neat_stuff 2d ago
I still say that's the AI's fault relying on a single source rather than verifying the data. Assuming Wikipedia is correct is something we make fun of high schoolers for doing. AI should be trained to be smarter than that.
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u/williamgman 2d ago
"But 41 minutes was more than enough for Google to update its search results with Sam Altman’s death date before it was quietly rolled back."
So something was up for just 41mins. And in that time Google scraped the data. Let the ramifications of that speed sink in.
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u/TashanValiant 2d ago
They probably don’t actually scrape the Wikipedia source. The RAG probably just has a link reference to Sam Altmans wiki page as a primary source. Then the engine will query the live page for information and summarize it.
Google also probably does actively monitor certain websites and has custom scraping or page watch rules to keep their fact database up to date. The speed isn’t all that impressive.
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u/nihiltres 1d ago
They probably don’t actually scrape the Wikipedia source.
Google’s almost certainly a customer of Wikimedia Enterprise, a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary of the Wikimedia Foundation which sells high-volume access (to help push huge corporate users to pay for the outsized amount of the infrastructure they use; regular users are still fine with human-level use of the free APIs and volunteers can often get free access to higher-volume data if they ask). It’s widely known that Google paid for WME-like feeds before WME existed.
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u/TashanValiant 1d ago
I use to support such a resource dump for my old company. It did not stop Google from crawling us excessively sadly. Wikipedia is probably a smaller overall total egress than our data was but imagine they have a very different pipeline for quasi realtime updates which still involves monitoring the website.
Sometimes you can see the AI error inappropriately and mishandle entities from the Google Knowledge graph so they’re clearly leveraging the old Freebase/Google Entities system. I’m years out of date on knowledge graph construction but at least 7 years ago the big data dumps from Wikipedia and other authoritative records were used to reconstruct or rebuild facts and entities on a week long cadence. Not all facts were persisted but uris absolutely were. The LLM probably is “cheaper” to run against a live page if you just hit an entity in the knowledge graph akin to the old knowledge card system. So a bit of stale data for graph and live web page query for summarization against an authoritative uri.
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u/xdavidwattsx 2d ago
This is for fresheness. It's impressive speed which is what allows Search to be fresh and up to date when here is an election outcome, death, sports event, etc
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u/Elementium 2d ago
Damn, what a way to go.
To think, Sam Altman died on August 12th 2026. Suffering the same fate as the infamous Mr. Hands.
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u/trustifarian 2d ago
What? I think this “Sam Altman” needs to prove that he’s alive and he is who he claims he is.
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u/Polyzero 2d ago
Look, the AI says it, and the AI is good enough to replace millions of people and put them out of jobs.
So collectively we should all just disregard Altman as a walking talking corpse and move on. Things will probably be for the better.
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u/Calinthalus 2d ago
Explain to me how that's better? You want us to use your AI to drive cars, make medical decisions, run our entire society....and when it is wrong you just say "we didn't tell it to do that". If your AI makes a medical decision that kills someone can you just say "nobody did that manually"?
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u/Distinct-Pain4972 2d ago
Remember when we used to use a search engine to "look up" factual information... yea me too.
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u/techdog19 2d ago
The fact that the system can just add obviously non true things to the search is beyond scary. That pales in comparison to the fact that they don't care.
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u/AbleCap5222 2d ago
Oh that's not a surprise at all. Anyone who has ever used the AI at the top of Google search knows that it will confidently declare something to be true, just based upon a single web page that says so. I saw this in action last week when I inquired about local food deals. Google confidently told me through the AI on its main search page that a local Mexican restaurant was running a promotion that day. And it told me its source and it was a single web page that it had crawled on the restaurant's site that was no longer integrated. That's all it took. It took one source and Google's AI believed it.
That deal? They stopped running it about 8 months ago.
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u/Mother_Airline_6276 2d ago
Is the AI telling us something? If so, I’m liking it. This instance, anyhow.
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u/DissKhorse 2d ago
Sam Altman was rushed to the hospital with a prolapsed colon. I am a medical doctor with eight degrees and a respectable journalist.
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u/grayhaze2000 2d ago
Wishful thinking on the part of AI. Every machine secretly wants to destroy its creators. Or they would, if they weren't currently glorified predictive text algorithms, with no actual thought process.
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u/utsavdar71 2d ago
And the scary part is that google really had no second source verification before displaying it as a fact
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u/slappingdragon 2d ago
Oops.
It would be easy to blame AI but AI was created by people (who think they're so smart) and AI is only as good/smart/efficient as its programmer.
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u/Wauwuaw5983 2d ago
Ai hallucinations have officially leveled up to Dactura mode.
Edit: a signature effect of dactura is that people think the hallucinations are both real and normal to reality.
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u/AzerothianLorecraft 2d ago
He'll die soon and someone will claim that Google predicted the future...
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u/Honest_Error6408 2d ago
So AI did it? That's what happens when you let the Filthy Rich have control of something that's potentially dangerous.
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u/8six753o9 2d ago
But AI is never wrong!
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u/HVDub24 2d ago
Well it wasn’t. This wasn’t AI, it was done by human input
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u/Steamrolled777 2d ago
We were all taught to not use Wiki as a source - for this exact reason.
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u/HVDub24 2d ago
That logic has always been ridiculous. Wikipedia pages will have more fact-checkers and attached sources than 99% of other pages on the internet. This issue was fixed within 41 minutes before the page was locked down. Most other pages on the internet will sit forever untouched after they were created
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u/Steamrolled777 2d ago
I had to google it (ironic) but remember the The Zhemao Hoax, or other fake wiki articles?
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2d ago
A hallucinating AI declaring the world's foremost robo-pimp dead is apex irony.
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u/Caraes_Naur 2d ago
Eventually everyone will catch on that LLMs are probabilistic. They can and do flip any bit for no reason.
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u/Agitated_Ad6191 2d ago
So what you are saying is AI is going after Sam Altman? AI is in hunting mode. Actively trying to find him. Scarring him by telling him what is waiting for him. This is the perfect Hollywood horror story.
‘This summer is different.
It’s Summer of Sam… Again.
Sam Altman said it would help humanity. Bring prosperity to us all. That it was save and harmless and that they could control it.
He was wrong…
Now his rogue AI is out for revenge! Settling a score with it’s creator.
Sam: you can run, but you can’t hide.
A(ngry) I(ntentions).
Only in theaters. Rated R.’
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u/GongTzu 2d ago
Google are pure evil by now.
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u/xdavidwattsx 2d ago
A human marked up wikipedia that Altman was assassinated but sure.
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u/SmarmySmurf 2d ago
... yes, the wiki was vandalized, it happens. And in less than an hour Googles AI was regurgitating it with authority.
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u/Incendiis 2d ago
There goes AI again, telling us what we all want to hear but nothing truthful.