The internet’s connectivity makes it far easier to spread lies than to remove them, and the internet’s scale makes it infeasible for humans to moderate it effectively. This accuracy is surprising given that the large language models (LLM) that power AI chatbots know nothing about the world. The LLM only knows which words typically follow other words in what we have written. The problem is not just that AI chatbots hallucinate, but that we’ve been hornswoggled into expecting them to be reliable sources of knowledge. They were built to put together human-like strings of words, and, at this, they are a flabbergasting, jaw-dropping success.

Source: New York Times November 02, 2023 15:40 UTC