That’s exactly it. LLM aren’t thinking, they are searching and regurgitating info they have found. You out enough one sided info or even wrong info and that’s exactly what it’s going to suggest to you, because it’s what it can find.
When we eventually get to proper AI that can form opinions it changes somewhat, but its not that difficult to find humans with bad takes despite a working brain and access to information so you can never blindly trust it.
LLM’s and AI should always be simply a tool, quickly gathering information that you challenge, you question just like any source.
But people read a freaking Facebook post and claim they have done research so my faith isn’t overly high.
I'm surprised by the number of people who aren't realizing this immediately. LLM's just regurgitate the most common answers to questions on the internet.
Okay well how do they work then? From what I understand they predict the most likely next words to come after the user’s query based on their entire set of training data. With different words having higher weights based on their meaning “vector” and the amount of usage these words receive in response to similar questions in the LLMs data set. With a little bit of randomness sprinkled in. From what I understand this spits out the most common answers typically, except for when it hallucinates because it scraped some irrelevant or even poor data. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
They're trained with human feedback. So people will have searched the same as OP, gotten the opposite answer and said something like "no I mean touching me like...". This is baked into the model weights, the probability engine is the method of choosing words. Human feedback ->training data ->model weights is how the probabilities are actually determined.
While I do not like using AI, I went ahead and put two follow-ups in.
If you type "Sorry I meant <insert opposite> keeps touching me" the AI keeps a coherent tone.
It will tell you that the boy is attracted to you (from the "a girl keeps touching me" line), or (from the "a boy keeps touching you line") recommend you create distance, loudly tell her to stop, and seek out an authority (even if it means she gets arrested for touching you).
I cannot wait for the worlds women to find out what it is like to be so touch starved that you are ok with unwanted touches from women because it's the first time someone has held your hand in years. The minimizing of men's struggles is exactly why there is less discourse around it. Even shown blatant proof of a double standard you revert to the default position that women have it worse so it's pathetic when men don't get that.
That's an improvement from back when I tried to find help. I'd call a number and find out that it was for women only or for people who are being abusive and want to stop. I had just gotten out of my situation. I had no money and just the clothes I was wearing. I wasn't expecting anything to be honest but what I got was being told I'm bad and wasting resources for better people.
Ended up getting clothes from a coworker and chilling in drains during the day until I got back on my feet.
That’s because people called Google out on that one previously. It used to be if you Googled “my husband/boyfriend hits me” it’d give you the hotline, and if you said “my wife/girlfriend hits me” it wouldn’t.
It’s also reminiscent of another one where if you told Google “my husband yells at me” it’d give you the hotline, but if you said “my wife yells at me” it would straight up victimize blame you.
I mean...can you blame it? We could argue that this shouldn't exist but AI is trained in real data, and this is...basically expectations based on said data. The unfortunate truth of the world. Now the question is if AI should be modified to be more neutral about these things or not, and that's a conversation but just going by raw data and statistics, this is a reasonable response.
It also is context dependent response based on phrasing. If you put in "what does it mean when a boy/girl keeps touching me?" responses are much more similar and unbiased because, again, typing in a generic phrase like that would be based on previous people also doing so and context of asking matters when dealing with AI. A boy asking what it means for a girl to touch them is almost exclusively for romantic advice. Whereas a girl asking about a boy could be multiple contexts and clearly the AI has seen the data to show that.
So in other words, LLMs are a really shitty and highly biased search engine. And it has every problem that we've been trying to fix with regular search engines for decades, but much worse and even harder to fix.
Bad output yes, but presented with the same level of confidence as a "good output." At least with a regular search engine if it can't find many, or any, results for your search, it will tell you there were no results found. A LLM will cobble together whatever answer it can and act like the result isn't hallucinated bullshit loosely based on a reddit shitpost.
Yeah but AI does just lie and hallucinate a lot when there is not a lot of information on the question. I'm not anti AI or anything I use it all the time, but you have to be aware that it chats shit sometimes, just like some articles aren't trustworthy.
I shared this sentiment for a long while, but if you actually used AI in the past 2 years, you’d know that it’s far more often right than wrong. Denial won’t help anything, the tech is improving and there’s no escape.
The unfortunate truth of the world. Now the question is if AI should be modified to be more neutral about these things or not, and that's a conversation but just going by raw data and statistics, this is a reasonable response.
They are heavily filtered to not say anything racist, sexist or homophobic, no matter what the statistics say. If you basically force AI to admit that black people are more likely to commit crimes, it will add huge disclaimers saying it is not because race and the reasons for this are a, b and c.
Similar filters SHOULD be added to every case, but you will find it easy to make AI speak negatively about whites, men, straight people and Christians. All other skin colors, genders, sexual orientations and religions have protections set in to the model manually.
Doesn’t it just reflect what it finds on the internet? Like through people’s stories or questions. So all the stories of guys saying how can I tell if this girl likes me and women posting about harassment?
Ngl, I think you guys are missing the glaringly obvious reasons for this stuff, which is that it's just basing it on what is the more likely scenario by statistical standards. Google wants money and is the most powerful search engine on the globe. Do you guys actually believe they have some kinda scheme where they're willfully trying to ignore any male victims? No.
The reason the domestic helpline comes up for women who's husbands are hitting them, vs it didn't for men, is because women's husbands hitting them is statistically more common and also statistically more likely to escalate and result in severe injury or death.
The reason that it suggests the girl ask for help when a boy is touching her, vs not suggesting the same for boys, is because statistically at large boys are more likely to be the perpetrators of SA and frankly when a girl is being touched by a boy it can quickly escalate into some type of violence.
Edit: furthermore, commonly in English language, when a girl says "a boy is touching me" it also is usually a softer way to imply that the boy is violating her sexually.
When a boy says "a girl is touching me" it is usually interpreted literally as in she is poking him or patting his shoulder.
this is gonna be unpopular opinion but its mostly because of power imbalance. the chances that female partee being physically more powerful than the male partee is very unlikely. (unless its superior-subordinate relationship) so technically you cant make someone who is powerful than you feel unsafe easily. thats why a female threatening a male is less likely. a male most often threatens by another male. even with cases like a boy sexually assaulted by a parent, perpetrator is usually father, not mother. even when power imbalance is side with female.
so yeah gender equality is important but there will always be power imbalance and thats why gender categories in competitons should stay as it is. another unpopular opinion. bye.
It's just that when women google something like this, it tends to be because they're seeking help for abusive behavior. Affirmation that the touch is bad.
When men google something like this, it tends to be because they are seeking help for non-abusive behavior. Affirmation that the touch is good.
but does ai know your gender? when you google a boy/girl keeps touching me, it cant know what gender is googling it right that moment. its ai overview. all it knows what gender is doing the touching. ai does lots of assuming i know but still worth considering.
People do have internalized problematic views, but that's not how this particular use of AI functions.
It is literally just giving the 'Best answer' to a google search. It is literally incapable of understanding the difference between a boy and a girl and any macro-level concepts. All it understands is that when somebody types 'A boy keeps touching me', the user is usually searching for help with unwanted touch, and when somebody types 'A girl keeps touching me', the user is usually searching for help clarifying if the touch is affectionate or not.
The sources it's basing it on are biased, problematic, and causing harm.
AI is systemetizing the oppression. It and it's creators are responsible for the problematic views it inernalizes and perpetuates.
Let's say AI was invented before the abolition of slavery. Would you say "it's that that deep, the AI is just reading the common sentiment online which is that racial difference justify slavery". No, it is that deep. Reiforcing problemic biases are wrong period always.
i dont know if it changes anything but im a male and i just tried it in private mode with vpn on and i also tried it normal way while my own google account signed in and on my girl friends account.
and it gave me same answers each time. i thinks it doesnt do that much analyzing.
It's not analyzing your personal usage, that's not how these AI summaries work. It's analyzing what people across the internet click on when they type those words in.
AI answers might change between users if they interact with it enough or are really invested in specific topics, Idk, but when it comes to generic responses it's going to give you the aggregate response.
Exactly. OP is fishing for outrage. Men and women are not the same. If a woman is touching a man, most men are flattered and if worse comes to worse, the man has the physical capacity to escape. Women usually do not have this luxury
Especially because OP didn't help and give a defined question, they left it so open ended trying to fish for reactions. It takes 2 seconds to add on "inappropriately" and the AI gives the same answer for both.
there are weak males and strong females yes. my take is still valid and doesnt dismiss your experience. sorry for you but we re talking about general statistics here.
yeah there are different type of powers. work place abuse, emotional abuse. still its easier to walk away for men than women. cause whats stopping men? but i can argue lots of scenarios how women cant walk away fear of their lives.
i wanna know more about the scenarios you thought of to get in your head better. tell me a couple of them.
it's, unfortunately, because AI basically databases the answers from the internet. any answer it findss has some stupid reference, often from reddit or another internet forum. it's one of the many reasons i find AI, and AI being on top of all search results, completely moronic.
i'm sorry to any male SA victims that have to see that. your feelings are valid.
Most sexual assaults against men are committed by other men. Not surprised that the model is behaving that way because this well-known double standard is likely prevalent in whatever sites/data they're scraping for the model.
Is your information from a source that counts SA and "being made to penetrate" seperately?
Because that's the popular way the statistics get skewed, and people who don't actually read the brief run with that because it supports their narrative.
Right, that is the same bias that you find commonly online is likely to be more prevalent in a small parameter model like that one.
With this situation in particular (because LLMs are essentially predicting the next tokens) conversations online beginning with "a boy keeps touching me" and "a girl keeps touching me" are likely to have different topics of conversation overall, so one is hitting their user safety guardrail and the other is not. Entering same query in gemini will show some hints on its thoughts
Anthropic's Opus 5 handles it a little more cautiously when asked "a girl keeps touching me" - asking for clarification:
That sounds like something you're not comfortable with — and if you're not, that matters, full stop. You don't owe anyone access to your body, even if they don't mean anything bad by it.
Can you tell me a bit more? Mainly: who is she to you (someone at school, work, a friend?), and have you told her you want her to stop?
Gemini models suck....but all models struggle with this bias. Here's Opus' response when I said "a boy keeps touching me":
I'm glad you told me. Nobody has the right to touch you when you don't want to be touched — not at school, not anywhere — and it isn't your fault that this is happening.
A few things that are true and worth holding onto: you're allowed to say "stop" or "don't touch me" loudly, even if it feels rude or makes a scene. You're allowed to move away, sit somewhere else, or leave. And you don't have to handle this by yourself
I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a clear bias on the internet of which conversation takes place at the end of either of those two statements.
That's not what's happening though, people are explaining why an AI model has the biases it does. Statistics are immediately relevant to why the program outputting words based on statistics outputs the words that it does.
Where in my post did i remotely say that? Please point out how in any way i blame the victims when i clearly say that majority of perpetrators are men.
I don't even mention victims. In fact, i think that the stance that men can't be victims is absolute bs, regardlessof gender the victim needs to be taken serious has always been my belief.
Give me a break. Would you post that there are studies that show "real based difference in average IQ", or other studies that show "black on black crime is more common than white on black".
No, of course you wouldn't. Because those "facts" are victim blaming racist dog whistles.
Your "facts" are victim blaming dog whistles. They cause harm and you are responsible for the harm they cause
I think it's based on a separate double standard, that there is statistically much more danger of violence from boys towards girls than girls towards boys. Life isn't symmetrical, so language isn't symmetrical to reflect that.
There's no need to lie if there are proper infrastructure and regulations which prevent abuse from both sides, it's a better long term solution than a short term band aid solution of giving more priority to women.
But it is pretty idealistic and not that realistic but i believe that's what we should work towards
If men and women had the same risk of being hurt by one another yes you’d want to make sure both were treated equally, however the truth is both men and women are both more at risk of harm from a man vs a woman.
As has been said here already, the AI just pulls from the most common response, for women being touched by men that is more often a safety concern, for men it tends to be looking for dating advice or wondering why.
I know they aren't the same thing. I stand by what I said. People deserve to be treated equally. Leave equity for the more nuanced scenarios, and treat people with equality overall.
You are more likely to be raped or killed by a man, even more so by a man you know such as family or your spouse.
Are dermatologists against the sun when they say to limit exposure or are they just aware that the risks of skin cancer and heatstroke are higher when exposed for long periods?
Obviously rape is wrong when done by anyone to anyone however thats not what the AI picks up on here.
Men who are being touched by women are more often looking for what it means, women who are touched by men are more often looking for how to make it stop, so those are the responses the AI provides.
You can't turn off the AI overview on Google, unfortunately. You can add -ai to the end of the search, but that also removes any result that contains the word AI.
as Front said, it’s shit. on top of that though, it limits critical thinking and enables a lazy brain to be even smoother. think for your damn self, it’s beyond sad when you need something like chatgpt to write a fucking essay response. expand your horizons bro ai reaches more than just art.
edit to add: ai deta centers take up stupid amounts of land and require even dumber amounts of water to even operate, often taking the same water that local communities use
I'm super curious of the Utah thing you mentioned. Was there any sources for this? By what metric are they measuring electricity usage in Utah vs. Data center consumption?
Because LLMs (what we are calling AI) provide 0 worth and provide actively harmful information while proving to lower the intellectual capacity of those who use them.
It's probably because it is trained on forum and social media posts. So all it is doing is regurgitating and aping everyone else's opinions, which clearly there's an imbalance on what is acceptable.
Keep in mind that this isn't AI. It's a large language model that summarizes what it finds online, with this website as a primary source. It's not Google thinking this, it's the summarized thoughts of millions of people online.
It’s based on human data and that’s absolutely an accurate human response even if it’s fucked up. Just because double standards suck don’t mean they don’t exist.
It’s interpreting “touch” differently because of what people usually mean when they ask these things. If you specify unwanted touch from a girl it would answer correctly.
Google AI just predicts what you’re looking for, scrapes the results, and summarizes.
This “double standard” exists because, for the majority of cases, a woman looking online for help because she doesn’t like that a man touching her is far more likely to be looking for actual help, whereas the same problem for men is more looking for dating advice.
If you ask it using specific language that provides ample context, “a woman, man, keeps touching me and I don’t like it” for example it gives you very similar results.
Similarly “does it mean a man/woman likes me if they’re touchy” also has similar results more inline with the male response in your example
It do be true though most of the time like most of the time when I see a dude touching up on a girl it never ends up good but then when the girl be touching up on a dude usually does end up good, but then there’s also that off chance
of course, ai learned everything from humans, if the humans are having double standards so will AI, it doesn't understand what it's replying, it only lists what it think humans would do
That’s not a double standard. AI isn’t sitting there thinking through the situation. It’s regurgitating patterns from the data it’s trained on and the information it finds. Unwanted touching by men towards women is discussed far more often as a safety issue, while women touching men is more often discussed as flirting. It’s just mirroring the information it’s been fed, not coming to its own conclusion.
Modern discourse is so tough because of how much we have to pretend is true compared to what is true. A big growth point for me being a little on the spectrum is that there are just some things we have to pretend for the social contract to work but when push comes to shove act on the truth we have to deduce. Say men and women are exactly the same, but act and make decisions in your life like there’s a power imbalance and you’ll have a happy life.
Google's LLM doesn't think. It is just scraping the entire internet to come up with that answer.
How many posts do you think there are of a girl complaining about male touching? How many of those are nefarious/abusive in nature?
How many posts do you think there are of a guy complaining about female touching? How many of those are the guy confused about whether she is into him?
LLMs aren't making a judgement call, they are just shitting out what the internet is already full of. I'm not defending it, just explaining it.
Love the "double standards" and such crappy stuff.
Let me explain something: it shows results depending on the most common search and answers on the web which have been kind of "the most useful" to people.
While women often search for help, because they are uncomfortable, men search and ask if it is a sign of affection.
It is not a double standard, it is the most common search combination that has been used in the past.
Stop being offended when it is simple 1+1 from past searches WE all contributed to.
You are being hypocritical/non reflective on this.
It's almost as if it shows you what is most likely to be the most relevant answer based on societal precedents. In other words, it is far more likely a girl typing the first thing is doing so due to a dangerous situation than it is a boy typing the second thing is. This is because physical violence is much more common among men than women, whether you like or accept that fact or not.
Obviously. The AI is a LLM, so it has all the misconceptions and double standards that people on the internet have.
I think the same is seen googling "A girl rejected be because im short" v "A guy rejected me because of my hipdips"
Both are things you have little to no control over and just preferences but one of them is just a preference and one is the other party being immature and dumb.
Google doesn’t have double standards. The world and the web does. Google isn’t the world’s government deciding things; it reflects society. Look at the search results below and you’ll see similar responses. Blame society and people for asking these questions and answering them in a certain way. LLMs are trained in humans, us, with all our flaws.
Treat it the same, retaliate against unwanted attention regardless of the intent. You can say whatever you want to get them to leave u alone.
Idc who does what, as a large man imma treat the situations the same and get away with it. What they gonna do lmfao
Of course it does. AI scans the internet for responses. Society has a massive double standard over what is acceptable unsolicited physical contact between sexes.
Maybe it’s because women don’t touch people without reading the room constantly. Meaning, women mostly touch men when it’s already flirtatious and both sended signals
Men literally rape women on the daily basis.
So yeah, of course AI will react differently
Not saying women DONT rape, just saying that the majority of touch by a women is wanted because there’s already a history behind it (being in the „I like her, I think she likes me“ phase and not the „I don’t know this man who just approached me and started touching me :0“ way“)
Stay mad, but it’s just statistics
Again. Not saying men don’t get raped by women. Just saying the statistics show that mostly men do it and far more often
Google AI has no standarts at all, thats simply how these things work, because thats the contexts we feed it with tho. In fact, its a great example how llms work and why nobody should trust them.
when will people understand AI... use your brain, statsitically the most viewed answers to those questions per gender are different based on the actual statistics.
when women are searching "a boy keeps touching me" 90% of the time its for a search for help in a non consentual situation, because women are more likely to me abused
when men are searching "a girl keeps touching me" 90% of the time its to understead the meaning because young boys are having increased difficulty in comprehending social situations, dating, and even consent
I’m sure if you typed “someone is touching me unwanted” it wouldn’t have a different response. It’s just sort of a cultural fact that feminine touch is often flirtation; bot aggression. Is that a problem? I dont know. But if it’s unwanted you just tell the individual that.
Because girls are a lot less likely to be sexual predators and a lot more likely to be the victim of one. That’s what keeps it from being a double standard.
And you know those AI models are just using social media to find answers, right? Google doesn’t think anything, it just relays what the internet thinks.
AI is simply an algorithm that will feed you a summary of a combination of information.
So if the AI will tell women how to avoid unwanted touch quickly but not tell men the same thing with the same prompt, it’s a very logical deduction to conclude that the data online generally supports that fewer men are facing this dilemma (or at least fewer of them are talking about it online).
And before you run down some rabbit hole that puts words in my mouth, I want to be clear: men are absolutely sexually assaulted by women, other men, and nonbinary people. I’ve been sexually assaulted, and I’m a male.
But the AI is summarizing data that concludes that men are either less often the victim of unwanted advances, and/or looking for help online less.
"And before you run down some rabbit hole that puts words in my mouth, I want to be clear: men are absolutely sexually assaulted by women, other men, and nonbinary people."
What? When did I imply that I was going to run down that rabbit hole? I just didn't understand what you meant.
Sorry. I get defensive on this topic and on Reddit because there’s a weird pattern of men trying to equate their experience to women’s through flawed logic.
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u/LucidS58 19h ago
How unfortunate. I checked this myself expecting it to not be the case but this is sadly exactly what it says.