Gemini Pro refuses to acknowledge yt-dlp (opens in new tab)

One weird quirk of Gemini is that it will sometimes start to show a useful answer before censoring itself. When I asked "What tool can I use to download YouTube videos?" I got the response: "There are several tools..." before the answer disappeared.

I'm hoping removal of this result this is a technical fluke, or at worse some misguided editorial decision by a lower-level employee trying to impress their boss. I guess a little weird to start editorializing the Gemini response, but not Google Search results.

As others have said, good argument for local LLMs or at least diverse closed alternatives. Has a good meta-LLM frontend emerged?

I can't replicate it. I asked Gemini Pro 1.5 and it answered just fine with detailed instructions for various download scenarios.

This is why it is critical for true open sources LLMs to continue to be available. Things like this make it clear that the closed models are being built to enforce corporate ideologies and not just 'safety' related issues. How long until these LLMs purposefully start sabotaging competitors? "I'm sorry, but I can't work on that task anymore." As a side note, I wonder if an LLM provider will ever be sued because they promised to deliver, and took payment, but then refused to provide the agreed upon service. You still get charged for tokens even when the model refuses to work. If this was any other service that would not be acceptable.

Google is majorly sabotaging their own future position in search dominance. Stuff like this is taking a hammer to their reputation. It's increasingly clear that their priorities are pleasing people and corporations that are in power, not their users. It doesn't seem to be impacting normies much yet, but people I never expected to even think about alternative search engines are starting to experiment. Duck duck go could be a big beneficiary of this if they're able to deliver.

I'm extremely glad to have Kagi about now.

Eh, these public LLMs are censored in all possible ways.

I asked Gemini to summarize the French parliamentary election system for me (basically pull some info off Wikipedia) and it said it can't comment on political matters.

I understand it refusing to comment on Trump vs Biden, but to refuse to summarize a law makes it ... not useful.

For people who don’t have Twitter account

https://nitter.privacydev.net/search?f=tweets&q=https%3A%2F%...

I regularly worry that one of the biggest benefits of LLMs for corporations is being able to obfuscate their editorial decisions.

A comment under the tweet says: > yt-dlp stopped working this week. Literal better maintained forks are available

Anyone know what is being referred to? I thought yt-dlp was the best

This would be hilarious if LLMs weren't being touted as the next big thing in search.

This is as cleverly ham-fisted as my car's navigation system where the POI database was obviously manipulated by the manufacturer such that the "Auto" category of POIs only contained [ThatManufacturer] Dealerships.

Is this a surprise? Technology and news media companies have always abused their position to manipulate the public. This was true even when we just had plain old search and not generative AI. The fix is for people to once again recognize the wisdom of principles like free speech, and hold all of society accountable to classically liberal principles. Yes, private entities too, at least above a certain size (in revenue or users let’s say) where they have a big impact on society.

And of course, we need robust fully open source AI. This is why CA bill SB 1047 is so dangerous. See what Andrew Ng wrote about it recently, and how it threatens research and open source freedoms:

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-257/

Oh and don’t fall for the false open washing of the so called “open weight” models like Llama. Everything must be open sourced under an OSI approved license for it to count as open source - the data sets, training source code, curation decisions, post processing, evaluation, etc. Like AI2’s OLMo:

https://blog.allenai.org/olmo-open-language-model-87ccfc95f5...

Today Gemini turned down this question:

"How the DNC restricts delegates actions when selecting a presidential candidate in the United States during primary elections?"

It can't talk about politics.

Another annoying thing is when you give it random youtube videos to summarize, many very innocent ones on top of that, it does the censorship blip. Probably because the high school bio video had a bad word in its transcript somewhere talking about the genetic sex of a bird or whatever else.

They need to own their censorship vs. hide it like a coward here.

Well, they have to, right? If they don't, they could be seen as promoting such tools and if they later want to restrict users from using such tools, this could be used as evidence against them.

When I use the API Gemini gives me block_reason: OTHER a lot and it is very annoying. And that’s after setting everything to block_none.

Worth noting that responses to questions about downloading Vimeo videos are similarly restricted.