Its the end of the world - part 5
Lots in the news again about AI but interesting to see Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet, the parent firm of Google) admitting that you shouldn’t “blindly trust” what AI is telling you. This comes on the same day I read an article from The Conversation about AI induced psychosis and an article from Semrush about how Reddit is increasingly considered a ‘source’ by AI.
People are becoming more and more used to AI in their lives and its good to remember that these are just computer programmes that, due to all the ‘learning’ they do on information provided by real people, can sometimes make a very good facsimile of a person. They do what they are programmed to do and it seems that we like them to agree with us but this is the problem - they cannot make a value judgement on a piece of information. To AI a piece on Facebook will hold the same weight as a piece from the World Service (let’s move on quickly from the debate over the BBC’s impartiality!) or the Guardian. It may even give it more weight when considering the number of people who agree with the sentiment (apparently not the case with Reddit) - even if its not actually based on any reality at all! AI does not fact check in the same way a person would and worse, being aware of all your other reading and interactions, it will generally confirm your bias because telling you that you were wrong could possibly lead you to using another AI - and that’s bad for business!! Please also remember that although I don’t think you can currently buy presence in an AI search, it is only a matter of time - we already have ‘sponsored’ (ie. paid for advertising) results in our ordinary searches that can lead to clicks because you’re in a rush and haven’t looked properly.Its
The debate about what to do has been raging for years as this is only really an extension of the old problem of algorithms deciding what content to show you. The algorithm and AI do not care what they show you or whether this will trigger some sort of crisis for you, they only want you to use their service, their social media channel for the enormous amount of advertising revenue associated with your presence there.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8drzv37z4jo
https://www.semrush.com/blog/reddit-ai-search-visibility-study