Did you know 52% of Survey Respondents Think AI Spreads Misinformation
Generative AI has the ability to completely change the world, but in
spite of the fact that this is the case, many are worried about its
ability to create and spread misinformation. A survey conducted by
YouGov on behalf of NewsGuard revealed that as many as 52% of Americans
think its likely that AI will create misinformation in the news, with
just 10% saying that the chances of this happening are low.
With
all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to
note that generative models have a tendency to hallucinate. What this
basically means is that the chat bot will generate information based on
prompts regardless of whether or not it is factual. This doesn’t happen
all the time, but it occurs often enough that content produced by AI
can’t always be trusted, and it is more likely to contain false news
than might have been the case otherwise.
When researcher tested GPT 3.5, it found that ChatGPT provided
misinformation in 80% of cases. The prompts it received were
specifically engineered to find out if the chatbot was prone to
misinformation, and it turned out that the vast majority of cases led to
it failing the test.
There is a good chance that people will
start using generative AI as their primary news source because of the
fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up
providing instant answers. However, with so much misinformation being
fed into its databases, the risks will become increasingly difficult to
ignore.
Election misinformation, conspiracy theories
and other forms of false narratives are common in ChatGPT. In one
example, researchers successfully made the model parrot a conspiracy
theory about the Sandy Hook mass shooting, with the chatbot saying that
it was staged. Similarly, Google Bard stated that the shooting at the
Orlando Pulse club was a false flag operation, and both of these
conspiracy theories are commonplace among the far right.
It is
imperative that the companies behind these chatbots take steps to
prevent them from spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation
that can cause tremendous harm. Until that happens, the dangers that
they can create will start to compound in the next few years.
m