In fairness it may take even less than that to poison a human. Judging the legitimacy of a data source is not a new problem. Though this is still interesting for a couple of reasons and I'm surprised Google would fall for it.
Google's bread and butter is rankings, I would think their skill in ranking sites would trickle into some algorithm for weighting whether a source has some legitimacy. It's interesting it would pick it up and weight it so heavily with an N of 1 from some random website. That without corroboration literally anywhere else for something that would clearly have at least some other presence would be ranked so high.
I actually wonder if this is an artifact of a naive implementation of "search and regurgitate" or if the system had good reason to believe information from whoever "Thomas Germain" is was trustworthy.
In fairness it may take even less than that to poison a human. Judging the legitimacy of a data source is not a new problem. Though this is still interesting for a couple of reasons and I'm surprised Google would fall for it.
Google's bread and butter is rankings, I would think their skill in ranking sites would trickle into some algorithm for weighting whether a source has some legitimacy. It's interesting it would pick it up and weight it so heavily with an N of 1 from some random website. That without corroboration literally anywhere else for something that would clearly have at least some other presence would be ranked so high.
I actually wonder if this is an artifact of a naive implementation of "search and regurgitate" or if the system had good reason to believe information from whoever "Thomas Germain" is was trustworthy.
> These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.
Sure, but this is also the Achilles heel. The resistance has a simple method of sabotage.
Human minds are able to jump outside the system, unlike the system itself.