The article isn't about a name collision, it's about the photo:

> confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name

Isn’t that name collision?

If it were a simple name collision in the way the original commenter seemed to mean, you’d search for your name, and see the photo and biography of a different person.

The article writer searched for his name, and found his photo attached to somebody else’s biography. That’s an incorrect search result.

No, he found another person's biography near his profile photo for his X blurb. They were in distinctly different content bubbles, even if it visually looked similar.

This reading isn't supported by the text

Too bad Tom Faber is dead so we'll never know the truth.

One day we’ll understand the mystery surrounding the death of all Tom Fabers at once.

To me, a name collision is when two or more entities share the same name or ID. What's claimed here is that Google was showing the photo of one person on the bio of another person. That's an identity consolidation error, where two unrelated people are treated as one. The name collision presumably caused the identity consolidation error, but you can have name collisions without identity consolidation errors.

As this article rightly points out, people don't tend to care for why your lossy abstraction is making them out to be dead.

That's name collision. The photo is chosen based on the name.

When I search for "Tom Faber", I expect to get results relating to a bunch of Tom Fabers.

When I see a knowledge panel result, I expect everything within it to relate to a single entity, regardless of name collisions. If it doesn't, that's incorrect. If it's too hard to disambiguate, it's better to not have the knowledge panel at all.

That said, I did this search just now. https://imgur.com/a/zEjrfte The top organic result is the author's X bio and has his profile pic in the search results page. To the right of it (across a gutter) is the knowledge panel about the physicist. I could see how one might get confused, but the X profile pic is just near the knowledge panel, not actually in it. So if this is what the author saw, I don't agree with the article. It'd be nice if he included an actual screenshot of what he's describing, instead of the cute "Why is Google..." thing.

> When I see a knowledge panel result, I expect everything within it to relate to a single entity, regardless of name collisions. If it doesn't, that's incorrect.

Sure, that's the goal. But it's not like this is an unreasonable thing to get wrong on Google's part. It's hard, this is not like they're failing at easy tasks here.

"Sure, that's the goal. But it's not like this is an unreasonable thing to get wrong on Google's part. It's hard, this is not like they're failing at easy tasks here."

Should unreasonable trump acceptable? If you fail at something then should you do it?

An uncharitable interpretation seems to allow it is acceptable to imply someone is dead because an algorithmic process is hard ... lol ... l8ers.

At which point is disinformation acceptable?

So we shouldn't use AI at all because it's often inaccurate? I think it's fine as long as it's made clear that it's not totally reliable, both in widespread public knowledge and in UI disclaimers.

I reckon it's reasonable to say we shouldn't use AI (LLMs) in places where we're looking for accurate information, yeah. Expectations for accuracy are higher in a seemingly curated summary.

Who would it be "curated" by if not AI?

Any form of auto-generated summary online is from AI

We don't need auto summaries if they're not actually correct. It's not a choice between AI or not AI, it's a choice between summaries or no summaries

People seem to like "mostly correct" summaries though, like most other things AI

> So we shouldn't use AI at all because it's often inaccurate?

Preferably not, yeah.

It is unreasonable when it has been reported multiple times, like the OP says they did before writing the article.

So Google is presenting summary information in a way that very much implies comprehension, but without any comprehension of context — i.e. a name collision is enough to throw them off and result in unrelated pictures and bio being smashed together?

Seems pretty irresponsible of Google to do that. And also, just... kind of lame. Google is slowly but surely changing their image from "tech wizard" to "kind of a joke", and they have nobody but themselves to blame.

It's AI-generated, like anything AI-generated you should not assume it's totally accurate. I would support some kind of disclaimer if it's not already there.

ChatGPT and any other LLM does the same thing, no?

Right, which is why their content generation has gotten a reputation for being slop and their answers have become synonymous with hallucination.

Yes, it's likely an unmitigable problem with trying to aggregate information in this way. That's why the value proposition of a search engine is that it presents information from primary sources, rather than trying to summarize it. Finding resources on other people with the same name is unsurprising, having the AI conflate you as it presents an aggregate is misleading, and enough so to be a real problem

Right, which is why reasonable levels of humility and wisdom would keep an organization from expanding their mission from indexing documents to providing automated answers to questions.

Their real mission is to sell ads on web pages. For this reason, they feel entitled to show web search as well as AI hallucinations.

> Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.

At this point they're certainly allowed to be surprised, annoyed (pick whatever word you want to describe it) that it's still happening. No need to be snarky, pal.

> No need to be snarky, pal.

Interesting time to choose to be snarky.

Was just using OP's own word choice ("pal") to highlight the unnecessariness of it. Given the current color of your comment, it seems like others have correctly picked up on what I was doing there. :)

I read the article and what I understood that a "knowledge panel/info box" popped up with this living man's picutre and a note saying he was deceased. It wasn't just an issue of several results coming up for a person with a common name.

Is Google not able to predict the likelihood of a name collision as you just did? Is your solution to just continue showing incorrect information?