i don’t think it’s emphasized enough that AI isn’t just making up bogus citations with nonexistent books and articles, but increasingly actual articles and other sources are completely AI generated too. so a reference to a source might be “real,” but the source itself is complete AI slop bullshit
the actual danger of it all should be apparent, especially in any field related to health science research
and of course these fake papers are then used to further train AI, causing factually wrong information to spread even more
Librarian here: Good news is that many libraries are standing up AI literacy programs to show people not only how to judge AI outputs but also how to get better results. If your local library isn’t doing this ask them why not.
Some people even think that adding things like “don’t hallucinate” and “write clean code” to their prompt will make sure their AI only gives the highest quality output.
Arthur C. Clarke was not wrong but he didn’t go far enough. Even laughably inadequate technology is apparently indistinguishable from magic.
I had to explain to three separate family members what it means for an Ai to hallucinate. The look of terror on their faces after is proof that people have no idea how “smart” a LLM chatbot is. They have been probably using one at work for a year thinking they are accurate.
I legitimately don’t understand how someone can interact with an LLM for more than 30 minutes and come away from it thinking that it’s some kind of super intelligence or that it can be trusted as a means of gaining knowledge without external verification. Do they just not even consider the possibility that it might not be fully accurate and don’t bother to test it out? I asked it all kinds of tough and ambiguous questions the day I got access to ChatGPT and very quickly found inaccuracies, common misconceptions, and popular but ideologically motivated answers. For example, I don’t know if this is still like this but if you ask ChatGPT questions about who wrote various books of the Bible, it will give not only the traditional view, but specifically the evangelical Christian view on most versions of these questions. This makes sense because they’re extremely prolific writers, but it’s simply wrong to reply “Scholars generally believe that the Gospel of Mark was written by a companion of Peter named John Mark” because this view hasn’t been favored in academic biblical studies for over 100 years, even though it is traditional. Similarly, asking it questions about early Islamic history gets you the religious views of Ash’ari Sunni Muslims and not the general scholarly consensus.
Idk how anyone searches the internet anymore. Search engines all turn up so I ask an AI. Maybe one out of 20 times it turns up what I’m asking for better than a search engine. The rest of the time it runs me in circles that don’t work and wastes hours. So then I go back to the search engine and find what I need buried 20 pages deep.
I’ve asked it for a solution to something and it gives me A. I tell it A doesn’t work so it says “Of course!” and gives me B. Then I tell it B doesn’t work and it gives me A…
I feel like I go through the whole alphabet of options before giving up and rtfming.
I usually skip the AI blurb because they are so inaccurate, and dig through the listings for the info I’m researching. If I go back and look at the AI blurb after that, I can tell where they took various little factoids, and occasionally they’ll repeat some opinion or speculation as fact.
At least fuck duck go is useful for video games specifically, but that one more or less just copy pasted from the wiki, reddit, or a forum shits the bed with EUV specifically though.
fuck duck go
This is the one time in all of human history where autocorrecting “fuck” to “duck” would’ve been correct.
Worst part is I’m pretty sure it autocorrected duck to fuck cause I’ve poisoned my phones autocorrect with many a profanities.
Agreed. And the search engines returning AI generated pages masquerading as websites with real information is precisely why I spun up a searXNG instance. It actually helps a lot.
It’s fucking awful isn’t it. Summer day soon when i can be arsed I’ll have to give one of the paid search engines a go.
I’m currently on qwant but I’ve already noticed a degradation in its results since i started using it at the start of the year.
The paid options arnt any better. When the well is poisoned it doesn’t matter if your bucket is made of shitty rotting wood, or the nicest golden vessel to have graced the hands of a mankind.
Your getting lead poisoning either way. You just get to give away money for the privilege with one and the other forces the poisoned water down your throat faster.
I pay for Kagi search. It’s amazing
I do too. Its pretty good but I feel not as good as search engines used to be. Though through no fault of its own. I just think garbage sites have paid for SEO and clog up results no matter what.
Everyone knows that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini can often hallucinate sources.
No, no, apparently not everyone, or this wouldn’t be a problem.
Luckily, the future will provide not only AI titles, but the contents of said books as well.
Given the amount of utter drivel people are watching and reading of late, we’re probably already most of the way there.
I was under the impression there were completely ai written books for sale on the internet on places like Amazon already!
There are, and you can even find tutorials on how to churn out these slop books and audiobooks to make a buck off people who don’t notice
In fairness, crumby books can hardly be blamed on AI. To quote my mother, “That train’s left the station.”
Like, the AI slop ones will probably have better writing, sadly.
You can absolutely blame AI for the explosion in slop books. Just because a bad thing happened before AI doesn’t mean it wasn’t made much worse by it.
Agreed 110℅.
