In a March 31 opinion in The Seattle Times about AI chatbots, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public co-founder Jevin West says that chatbots will be “vectors of propaganda,” make it harder to discern truth and further erode trust in institutions.
In his article, West, an Information School associate professor who studies misinformation, points to two main reasons: “They are bullshitters at scale, and they are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse engineer.”
West, co-author of the book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Penguin Random House, 2020), continues in The Seattle Times:
I teach a class on bullshit — an act, often with full confidence, intended to persuade, with no allegiance to truth. My colleague and co-instructor of the class, Carl Bergstrom, asked Galactica, Meta’s large language equivalent, to describe Brandolini’s BS asymmetry principle: “the amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
Galactica’s answer: “a theory in economics [Not True] proposed by Gianni Brandolini [Not True], a professor at the University of Padua [Not True], which states that ‘the smaller economic unit, the greater its efficiency [Not True] …” The falsehoods continue for another two paragraphs, but I think you get the point. It was BS-ing the BS principle. This chatbot, like others, answers right and wrong with the confidence of a car salesman.
Read West’s article, “The chatbot era: Better or worse off?,” in The Seattle Times.
Previous CIP-contributed columns in The Seattle Times:
- Madeline Jalbert | “Why bad information can linger in the brain”
- Jevin West | “A volcanic change in the social media landscape”
- Mike Caulfield | “Voters beware: Old fraud narratives may resurface in midterm elections”
PHOTO ABOVE: Center for an Informed Public co-founder Jevin West, presents a MisinfoDay 2023 workshop session at the University of Washington on March 14.
