Carl T. BergstromMar 23, 2023

Yesterday I had a number of conversations with people working in the scholarly publishing sphere about what happens when AI chatbots pollute our information environment and then start feeding on this pollution.

As it so often, the case, we didn’t have to wait long to get some hint of the kind of mess we could be looking at.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23651564/google-microsoft-bard-bing-chatbots-misinformation

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Microsoft’s AI chatbot Bing incorrectly reported the demise of Google’s AI chatbot Bard. It’s an early warning sign that this technology is fueling a massive game of misinformation telephone.

The Verge
Show threadCarl T. BergstromMar 23, 2023
My fear is that we’ve created an information ecosystem that is uniquely susceptible to the perversions of these AI tools. Fifty years ago, had they existed, they would’ve been mere curiosities because we lacked the information infrastructure for their output to swamp more trusted forms of information. Even twenty years ago there would have been substantially less opportunity for them to have cause harm.
Show threadCarl T. BergstromMar 23, 2023

The confluence of this technology with the information ecosystem that we described in our paper from a couple of years could be an epistemic catastrophe.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118

I’m coming to think that releasing these tools was a reckless act with the potential to generate negative externalities we have barely started to imagine.

The threat isn’t rogue superintelligence. It’s bullshit at unprecedented scale, reflected back upon itself and iteratively amplified.

Show threadqwack!
@ct_bergstrom Absolutely agree that the threat of AGI is a misdirection, as if it's the main risk and anything short of it is a-ok. But Metalhead is way more plausible than Terminator.
If anything, techbros have shown us that intelligence is not required to do evil at scale.
Mar 23, 2023 at 1:01pmWeb