Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccurate Answer

Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by samtho on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:54PM (#34711884)

This article lacks any sort of reasoning or rationale to dispel the possibility that this is merely a timing fluke. Tech companies are sensitive to capital availability, even those who are publicly traded. As the fed tightens interest rates, we will see more stock dips in the short term. Additionally more layoffs across the industry were announced this week and Google, Apple, et. al. are a proxy “tech” to a huge number of people.

The biggest issue here is just the perpetuation of reductionist thinking on the part of many stock market blogs and thought leaders.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter what any human thinks about this article. I suspect it’s written to influence high-volume, automated trading systems given the other types of absolute hot garbage there is on that site.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by lazzlazzlazz on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:37PM (#34712609)

This is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc" and is near 100% of the content in mainstream financial publications. It mostly noise that reflects the interests of the authors and nothing more. Just take it for granted and move on.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by fakedang on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:52PM (#34712848)

There's a reason we have TVs running financial news through the work day in finance offices worldwide - but in mute.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by acchow on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:40PM (#34713701)

This is why all of these media outlets use words like "as" and "after", and never "because of". They do all the "post hoc" lifting and assume that the reader will automatically add the "ergo propter hoc".

"Google stock tumbles 8% after its"

which every consumer of media reads as

"Google stock tumbles 8% because its"

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by EForEndeavour on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @05:01PM (#34715987)

This shady use of temporal sequence to imply a causal link is one of my most hated writing tactics.

"HN Reader barfs aggressively after reading yet another intentionally misleading headline!"

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by ryandrake on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:42PM (#34719489)

There's probably an algorithm out there that just writes financial news all day using the MadLib:

"[COMPANY] stock [RISES|FALLS] amid [NEWS]."

All you have to do is foreach company, look up whether the stock is up or down, and then copy the first news search result that comes in related to the company. Bam, you have a headline for any financial news site.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by nradov on Thursday February 09, 2023 @11:52AM (#34726945)

Yes some financial news outlets have been doing that since at least 2015.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-aut...

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by minsc_and_boo on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:29PM (#34712470)

I mean, you said it yourself - there's an HFT moment happening with negative articles being robotically written that is causing the stock to drop. If anything it's a bit of an over-correction from the positive bump GOOG had recently from the same robot articles of the initial Bard announcement.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by zenmacro on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:35PM (#34712576)

Price action of Big Tech companies today:

AMZN: -2.2%

AAPL: -1.9%

META: -3.42%

MSFT: +0.45%

GOOGL: -8.21%

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by PathOfEclipse on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:47PM (#34712770)

Nonononono when two related things happen in sequence, one must have caused the other! But seriously, I can't think of any principle ignored more often than correlation != causation. It seems to be the easiest way to trick people into believing something is true without having to go through the trouble of finding real evidence.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by kbelder on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:04PM (#34713039)

"There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild donkey of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hind legs and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: 'It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!'"

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by spoils19 on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:20PM (#34732484)

> correlation != causation

Thanks to that, I doubt everything else you wrote and will have to corroborate it with sources I trust more.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by berkle4455 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:52PM (#34712838)

> is merely a timing fluke

What? Look at GOOGL and MSFT stock for the past 30 days. They follow eachother very well (as do most mega-cap tech stocks where there's nothing specific happening). Except for the last 2 days when MSFT announced a deep partnership and search integration with a leading AI LLM, and at the same time Google announced a clearly half-baked attempt to stay relevant.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by braingenious on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:56PM (#34712911)

> This article lacks any sort of reasoning or rationale to dispel the possibility that this is merely a timing fluke.

Why is it the author’s job to entertain hypotheticals like that?

Microsoft announced a generally available feature based on popular technology.

Google posted a gif of their chatbot malfunctioning as part of a blog post explaining that it’s not available.

Some things are kind of obvious.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by anigbrowl on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @02:15PM (#34713261)

This article lacks any sort of reasoning or rationale to dispel the possibility that this is merely a timing fluke.

True, and this is why I don't consider IBD a reliable source; it's basically a news outlet for people who think the WSJ leans too far to the left and has reeked of confirmation bias as long as I've known it (since the 1990s).

That said, this was a massive self-own on Google's part, like a Dad proudly unveiling a DIY project that's way better than that factory-made crap - only to have it catch fire seconds after being switched on.

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Re:Google Stock Tumbles 8% After Its Bard AI Ad Shows Inaccu... by kgwgk on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:05PM (#34714101)

Google has closed 5% down only six times in the last ten years.

Three of those where in March 2020 with the S&P 500 going down just as much if not more.

Two were following earnings releases.

The remaning one was because of concerns about big tech regulations: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/apple-google-facebook-amazon...

Or maybe that was just a coincidence and it was just a timing fluke - like going down 8% today while the rest of the market is almost flat.

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