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Why You Shouldn't Trust AI Search Engines


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Pinocchio, the character in children's literature whose nose grows when he lies.

AI language models are notorious liars, often presenting falsehoods as facts.

Credit: Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | Envato

Last week was the week chatbot-powered search engines were supposed to arrive. The big idea is that these AI bots would upend our experience of searching the web by generating chatty answers to our questions, instead of just returning lists of links as searches do now. Only … things really did not go according to plan. 

Approximately two seconds after Microsoft let people poke around with its new ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, people started finding that it responded to some questions with incorrect or nonsensical answers, such as conspiracy theories. Google had an embarrassing moment when scientists spotted a factual error in the company's own advertisement for its chatbot Bard, which subsequently wiped $100 billion off its share price. 

What makes all of this all the more shocking is that it came as a surprise to precisely no one who has been paying attention to AI language models.

From MIT Technology Review
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