It seems to me it relies mostly on discounting just how much we've already had to deal with this same problem in humans over the millenia.
The problem of proliferation of bad information might be getting worse, but this isn't native to generative AI. The entire informational ecosystem has to deal with this. GPTs compound the issue, but as far as I can tell, no where near what social media has forced us to deal with.
A human's lie is different than an AI's hallucination, since it's still based on (distorting) the truth, whereas the hallucination is based on an invented reality (yes I know it's applied statistics and there's no true model of the world in there, but it can report as if there is)
LLMs are no different in this respect.
LLMs on the other hand are amazing and prolific liars and can produce a lot of bullshit for a price that’s effectively free - in fact it’s cheaper to create a LLM that’s inaccurate than one that’s … less inaccurate. The truth to lie ratio on the internet is about to take a huge hit. LLMs really are a Pandora’s Box.
Humans always assemble information according to a standard of truth. It is a big part of how humans learn. No method is perfect but the human method results in fewer routine hallucinations.
Embodiment and multi modal AI will likely provide such filters or limits to AI in which it can derive truth.
I'd love you to produce data to back this up.
My guess is that you are wrong, on the basis of how often I discover that I'm full of shit and how often I discover other people are full of shit.
Humans are built for being wrong just as much as being right. We wouldn't have such complicated institutions and social structures built around controlling for those symmetric capacities if it weren't the case.
Even then, we find ourselves surrounded and overcome by falsehoods of our own design.
with AI this limit is all but removed
all the human generated bullshit ever created will soon be dwarfed by what AI can vomit out in an hour
LLMs changes all that. They can produce content on a massive scale that can drown out everything else. It doesn’t help the fact that more inaccurate LLMs are cheaper and easier to create and run - think about all the ChatGPT3 level LLMs vs ChatGPT4 level LLMs; guess which ones SEOs will gravitate towards.
> Because everyone has at least tried to lie - not necessarily for malicious reasons, e.g. white lies - a few times in their lives and know it’s not easy coming up with plausible sounding lies.
How do you know that?
Common knowledge.
Regardless, the amount of false information on the internet used to be limited by the amount of people producing it. Some of it is deliberately produced misinformation. Some of it are just mistakes due to carelessness, others due to willful negligence - example of the latter would be content farms who make their money off flooding search engine result pages and pushing ads in your face when you visit their website; who couldn’t care less what if you got what you came for.
Despite all that the internet was still useful. There are enough people posting accurate information such that the signal to noise ratio is good enough.
LLMs will change all that. They have the potential to flood the internet with hallucinated falsehood. And because bad LLMs are cheaper and easy to create and operate, those will be the majority of LLMs used by aforementioned content farms.
They won't make up a lie when telling the truth is far easier and when they do have to lie, it's a slight bit more effort.
But that's a moot point with LLMs ...
If/When they use LLMs, they will pick the cheapest LLM possible which will produce the most garbage - they might not even bother keeping it up to date; why bother when hallucinated BS sound just as convincing.
It has already started to happen.
In doing so the species would improve critical thinking skills which can be applied to all information regardless of source. Which, I agree, was often BS to begin with. But in theory would be more difficult to skirt on by without notice if humanity upgraded their critical thinking.
That soft data could have never been trusted, rhe information that can be verified (calculations etc.) seems safe from LLM
What I'm responding to is the strong tendency to discount our very long history of dealing with factually incorrect information and the ascertainment of truth from sources both dubious and trustworthy.
Entire institutions are set up in order to handle these very real problems, the set of which currently dwarfs the problem of hallucinations in GPT.
From a social perspective, non-GPT falsehoods are even more insidious, because we are inclined to trust and believe those whom we like and are like us.
Again, people are in the habit of discounting just how much we are wrong in our everyday lives. The hallucinations therefore appear more singular than they actually are.