I tried finding a FOSS app that I could use to use my phone as a mouse (all options for this seem really shady IMO) and Google’s “AI overview” recommended the app “Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse”. Seemingly, because it has a (mostly empty) Git repo with typical folders. I tried entering the search term into Copilot on my work computer and got the same result, Copilot also gave a little speech on why the app was FOSS. Only when told there was no source code in the repo did Copilot backtrack and say it wasn’t open source (and later having it listed as not recommended because of an unknown origin [eventhough it’s in the Google Play store…]).
As a user, i.e. not contributor, of FOSS I found this an interesting revelation. Is this an intentional catfishing strategy to get apps promoted by the LLMs – as a semi-illegitimate growth hack for a legitish app or for entirely illegitimate purposes? Or just a serendipitous LLM hallucination?
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AI is just shit and doesn’t know what it’s talking about 90% of the time.
Strictly speaking, it doesn’t know anything. But regardless of the merits of LLMs, the AI box is the top result on the biggest search engine in the world by default, and what I’m wondering is whether this is an example of intentional manipulation of the search results to give people who don’t know better the false impression that apps are open source.
I know its not intelligent and thinking, you know what I mean. It could be manipulation, we’d really have know way of knowing. With how much it makes shit up tho, I lean towards that rather than conspiracy.
Hallucinations, but also not helped by the fact that people (knowingly or not) promote proprietary garbage in FOSS communities. I remember the “reddit answers” feature when I tried it out frequently suggested proprietary crap in “list of best FOSS” type topics.
KDE Connect lets you use your phone as a mouse, among other things.
KDE connect is amazing, I’ve used it way more than I thought I would.
Thanks, yes, I came across it and it looks very good but the target device is an IPad so I didn’t consider it an option (well, I found no closed or open options I liked, really).
You want to use your phone as a mouse for an iPad? I don’t think iPads allow for virtual input devices, I don’t think you will have much luck.
corporations act the opposite of hanlon’s razor. you can very much attribute their actions to malice.
So you’re suggesting that the AI “knew” that the “Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse” app wasn’t FOSS, but recommended it to OP anyway when they asked for a FOSS app, and it did so out of malice? Or you think Google has provided explicit instructions for Gemini to promote non-FOSS apps to people who ask for FOSS apps because they’re evil?
Seems much more likely to me that the LLM just doesn’t actually understand anything it’s talking about and the embedding space it ended up in when given OP’s prompt caused it to surface this random non-FOSS app.
Thus, Hanlon’s Razor.
