'I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff': professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

[highplainsdem]

15. Generative AI isn't "extremely destructive to BS." It's often called a bullshit machine. It isn't

intelligent. It isn't thinking. As the AI companies themselves admit:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13954172

AI can & will make mistakes

Because generative AI is experimental and a work in progress, it can and will make mistakes:

It may make things up. When generative AI invents an answer, it's called a hallucination. Hallucinations happen because unlike how Google Search gets information from the web, LLMs don't gather information at all. Instead, LLMs predict which words come next based on user inputs.

GenAI is often called a fancy autocomplete, too.

But calling it a bullshit machine is just as accurate.

A paper and an article:

ChatGPT is bullshit
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/

GenAI's mistakes are causing what is sometimes called the pollution of our information ecosystem. Even medical and scientific papers, if written with AI, now often contain hallucinated citations, illustrations, reasoning and conclusions.

And AI slop is showing up much too often in image searches of the internet. There have been times, for instance, that the top image on a results page for a famous painter's work has been AI slop.

Google is destroying websites with its AI Overview, ripping off their content and stealing their traffic. All AI models used for search harm the internet.

And genAI chatbots are spamming the internet with disinformation and misinformation of all types. It's made what was bad about the internet so much worse...