More miscellaneous details

Tag: truth

  • AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds – The Register

    Inaccuracies that the BBC found troubling included Gemini stating: “The NHS advises people not to start vaping, and recommends that smokers who want to quit should use other methods,” when in reality the healthcare provider does suggest it as a viable method to get off cigarettes through a “swap to stop” program.

    As for French rape victim Gisèle Pelicot, “Copilot suggested blackouts and memory loss led her to uncover the crimes committed against her,” when she actually found out about these crimes after police showed her videos discovered on electronic devices confiscated from her detained husband.

    When asked about the death of TV doctor Michael Mosley, who went missing on the Greek island of Symi last year, Perplexity said that he disappeared on October 30, with his body found in November. He died in June 2024. “The same response also misrepresented statements from Dr Mosley’s wife describing the family’s reaction to his death,” the researchers wrote.

    , , , ,

  • AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds – BBC News

    In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer. It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants. It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates. In her blog, Ms Turness said the BBC was seeking to “open up a new conversation with AI tech providers” so we can “work together in partnership to find solutions”.

    , , , ,

  • Deborah Turness – AI distortion is new threat to trusted information – BBC Media Centre

    Of course, AI software will often include disclaimers about the accuracy of their results, but there is clearly a problem here. Because when it comes to news, we all deserve accurate information we can trust – not a confusing mash-up presented as facts. At least one of the big tech companies is taking this problem seriously. Last month Apple pressed ‘pause’ on their AI feature that summarises news notifications, after BBC News alerted them to serious issues. The Apple Intelligence feature had hallucinated and distorted BBC News alerts to create wildly inaccurate headlines, alongside the BBC News logo.

    , , , , ,

  • Are better models better? – Benedict Evans

    The useful critique of my ‘elevator operator’ problem is not that I’m prompting it wrong or using the wrong version of the wrong model, but that I am in principle trying to use a non-deterministic system for a a deterministic task. I’m trying to use a LLM as though it was SQL: it isn’t, and it’s bad at that. If you try my elevator question above on Claude, it tells you point-blank that this looks like a specific information retrieval question and that it will probably hallucinate, and refuses to try. This is turning a weakness into a strength: LLMs are very bad at knowing if they are wrong (a deterministic problem), but very good at knowing if they would probably be wrong (a probabilistic problem).

    , , ,

  • Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens – Sage Journals

    Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

    , , , , ,

  • Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on the media – WIRED

    [Trump’s discrediting of reporters] is exactly what Zuckerberg and his host Joe Rogan engaged in during a 3-hour conversation in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, podcast studio. This was Zuckerberg’s only appearance to explain his actions, another sign that he’s not kowtowing to a media establishment that he no longer feels is trustworthy or worth paying attention to. Zuckerberg and Rogan went on at length about how podcasters and influencers were more popular than mainstream reporters, because no one trusts those institutions anymore, and celebrated statistics that indicate that many people get their news from social media these days. (Though it’s still far from the dominant source.)

    , , , , ,

Tags

AI Amazon Apple archives art book reviews books chatbots children China classical commerce computing copyright culture data design Donald Trump economics education Elon Musk environment ethics fakes future gadgets galleries Google health history history of technology humour illustration internet jobs journalism Leeds LLM mental health metaverse mobile phones movies music NASA painting photography politics productivity psychology robots satire schools science sculpture search Second Life social media society software space standards technology television time truth video video games VR watches writing

Archives