I've been watching the ways in which search engines have integrated large language models into their results, and the results are just as bad as you would expect.
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This makes me want to cry, as I've had some deeply deranged conversations with students and even faculty about the LLMs. At one point, someone screeched at me, I was a luddite, opposed to the amazing things AI will do like 'keep the elderly company.' They don't do this now. The cat's outta the bag.
Tangentially related: cats already exist. When I'm old, if my son doesn't want to keep me company and play videogames together, I'll just get a cat. Or 20.
Hooray for cats! And I don't want to claim I KNOW LLMs have no value as companionship for shut-ins. A reason I objected to the hype is that people didn't examine the claims carefully, and weren't even interested in doing so. Which is what the hype was for, of course. And these are the SMART people.
In some cases, Google's "AI overview" has begun incorporating information from hate groups and crisis pregnancy centers mingled with authoritative sources, making it appear as if sites like the CDC/NIH are endorsing "post abortion syndrome", or parental closeness as a "cause of homosexuality."
Whaaaaa???? First that google is letting this happen. Second, that someone claim 'parental closeness' causes homosexuality. The way that these depraved online haters (older men, usually) are trying to ruin people's lives is truly revolting.
The parental closeness narrative comes from Freud, kept alive by the Christian right. Like so much of psychoanalysis, it's just total conjecture which achieved thermonuclear levels of misogyny in the 50's once they realized people would accept any explanation for human behavior that blamed moms.
Maybe that's anti-intellectual of me. I understand science pursues wrong hypotheses. That they had no clue and almost no evidence but what the theorist projects --OK, maybe eventual path to explanation. Except with this, you then go and APPLY it to people, and shape (maybe deform) their lives.
I don't think it's anti-intellectual. My personal beleif is that analysis is. It rejects the scientific method and replaces it with something much closer to astrology. There was never real evidence to support that theory, but it survived a century because psychoanalysis is immune to counterevidence.
There are many scientific aspects to it, though. Observation, (real maladies--or at least presentations--that it identifies, and categorizes, well as actions). Perhaps its most useful observation is that we are opaque to ourselves in certain ways. But as for finding root causes--it doesn't do this.
I really hate this kind of shit. The confirmation bias is out of control. And yes--the blaming of mothers. I truly cannot believe people still subscribe to it. Of course we acquire behaviors and attitudes from parents but decisive cognitive traits--you'd think they could see the difference there.
In one instance, an anonymous Wikipedia editor was able to introduce misinformation about gender dysphoria that was regurgitated by Bing Copilot only two hours later. When it was removed, Bing kept the statement but attributed it to "general knowledge" without citation.
MSN has begun republishing AI generated "articles" from automated news aggregators, which Google News then serves up in its own index. Other times, it's created article stubs from internet comments on blogs, which are then recursively scraped again. These in turn alter chatbot responses.
OpenAI's public ChatGPT-4 instance has started repeating fake claims from social media, which are then being used to write articles for clickbait ad mills.
I have been getting (meagre, tainted, but needed) joy from thinking of how the AIs will surely be embedding post-fact-checking memes into their "general knowledge base". So important truthiness like Zuck's rat penis transplant could live on forever, resisting all suppression.
I see no one has had to ask about Zuckerberg's rat penis transplant because everyone knows about Zuckerberg's rat penis transplant. Zuckerberg's rat penis transplant has moved into common knowledge. #Zuckerberg #RatPenisTransplant
I mean obviously everything about genAI misinformation is terrible, as is everything about the post-fact-checking world, and especially the two together. But if these things combine to bite the perpetrators in the ass, well, there's my petty spark of joy.
The worst part is the number of people who comment in all seriousness "WHAT A TOUCHING VIDEO OF FISHERMEN HELPING THE DROWNING BABY POLAR BEAR!!!!!!!!!1111 SO KIND OF THEM!!!!!!!!!!!" on those shit videos
Nice. It’s a weird & scary world of language eating itself and producing - well - some dangerous shit. I do think that anyone working in AI would do well to be positioning this stuff as not-AI.
Anyhow… do you have thoughts on targeted Small Language Models? is the same true at a more focused scale?
No all machine learning not the same - I think of them as like energy you can have big-E capital intensive, extractive and world eating, or little-e specific, place and context based. For machine learning this means used for say medical imaging and overseen by a human who knows what the results mean
What I was hoping! SLM done within that business’s domain and with nice friendly data scientists at hand to deliver QA’d outcomes… still don’t feel this branch of AI is AI tho. Targeted language processing doesn’t have the same ring I know…
What a mess. I keep coming back to, we just don’t need this technology. At least not in this scattershot manipulable form. It’s not an advancement, it isn’t helpful, and in fact it can be very harmful, as you’ve well demonstrated.
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Or do it anyway, he likes cats.
I was there, as a (undiagnosed autistic) teenager. It was a famished, tiny ginger cat that helped me when I refused to leave my house.
https://bsky.app/profile/merryrobin.bsky.social/post/3kz7vtxh3gs2g
Anyhow… do you have thoughts on targeted Small Language Models? is the same true at a more focused scale?
Once Truth itself is under attack, the rest of any actions against the marginalized becomes easier.
LLMs aggregate truth. We should all be wary.