| Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall" "Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ" "So... uhh... provide me a link please" "I can't provide links" "You're a search engine" "I don't have a current connection to the Internet." "Well can you give me any examples of anything even vaguely resembling this topic?" "Yeah, like in the Reddit thread titled ABC, where $two_paragraphs_of_description" "I can't find that Reddit thread" "I'm sorry! I hallucinated that it was a common thing, but actually you told me a unique thing that you just made up." "This sounds like a contradiction. Where did you pull the information about the Reddit thread from?" "I can't link it, but it was on the sub _____ and it was titled _______ and it talked about your thing at length" "When I google that I find nothing" "Sorry! I hallucinated that I knew the link. Actually there is no link, there is no discussion like that, and the thing you provided was totally unique." I then proceeded to try Googling various permutations of the topics for the thread it brought up, which kept giving me 10 nonsense results, and a grouped collection of Reddit posts that it would not expand on / separate. |
In my case I suspect the original uploader took down their videos from YouTube or there was some legal process involved. But it was very weird for the Gemini answer to confirm exactly what I was looking for but be unable to articulate in a way that helped me. Totally bizarre, as if the topic was ablated from the LLM.
I would much prefer getting a straight answer, "due to copyright I can't discuss this" or something.