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?
You must log in or register to comment.
You are searching for FOSS apps. You are a minority. There is no incentive to make AI lie about whether or not an app is FOSS - it’s just not a selling point to the vast majority of people.
However, AI is incentivised to give you an answer that it “thinks” will make you happy. That’s one of the reasons why it lies all the time.
I mean, you do you, but if you’re gonna go the FOSS way, you kinda hafta ditch google and especially its “AI” bullshit.
otherwise, that’d be like you turning vegan and going to a steakhouse and be all like “what salads y’all got”
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.
I understand you better now. Yes that’s certainly possible, plausible even. But it would seem useful for someone who wants to boost the credibility of their (hypothetical) keylogger app with exotic permissions to have a way to independently be recommended as a good open source option by two leading models in mainstream use.
I could absolutely see a situation like that, where someone tries to use it to intentionally push misinformation. In my experience with AI, its really difficult to get it to push consistent results, because as established, if really likes to hallucinate stuff. Using AI to push propaganda, at least in this stage of its development, seems like an exercise in futility. How many times has Elon Musk gone back and fiddled with Grok because its not behaving the way he wants it to behave?
[Bad thing] catfishing as [good thing] via Google’s AI results?
Yup.
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.
There are actually a few closed apps that do it, some claim to make your phone discoverable as a Bluetooth HID and others via a server/client combo. But I don’t really want to have an internet enabled device being able to track all my screen interactions and control another internet enabled device without some assurance that there’s nothing nefarious going on behind the scenes.
corporations act the opposite of hanlon’s razor. you can very much attribute their actions to malice.
In this case I think its probably a hallucination, but in the future people are absolouitly going to try optimising for ai search. At this point, it seems a natural progression for businesses doing seo(search engine optimisation).
How blatently catfishy that would be i’m not sure…doing it outright like that I don’t think would be as effective. Especially with FOSS stuff, the market for people looking for that and won’t check is unfortunately quite small.
Yes, I find this credible. At the same time, FOSS and Linux seems to be all the rage now, with big tech’s ties to the Trump regime etc. Even though it’s been nearly two decades ago since I first installed Linux (in the late 00’s I even had an awkward “FOSS as an ethical alternative to piracy” phase), I am not in the tech savy crowd that’s been mainlining this stuff for life – rather I identify more with the growing number of tech illiterate dummies that think “FOSS = good” because Pewdiepie said so or copy/pastes sudo commands that replaces half my boot drive with North Korean crypto malware.
Breaking news: AI is worthless. Stop using it.
