An ever-evolving cast of Hollywood villains including Nazis, Russians, South African white supremacists, Middle Eastern terrorists, South American drug lords, dinosaurs, aliens, Wall Street thugs and now Tim Robbins. Think about it.
It’s Robbins, who played the lethargic IT director named “Bernard” in the AppleTV+ sci-fi series “Silo,” about thousands of people living underground for reasons they don’t understand, and Bernard is reluctant to explain. increase.
IT bosses are (so far) the bad guys, taking advantage of our growing cultural fears about technology, whether it’s a threat to jobs or the proliferation of artificially generated misinformation.
This concern was evident when the University of Chicago club recently discussed South and West development. There, Roger Hochschild, Chief Executive Officer of Discover Financial Services, said the River Woods-based banking and payments giant with his 30 million customers and his 20,000 employees worldwide. He detailed the new Southside giant call center that he built.
The first two had nothing to do with development or shameful poverty, when the floor responded to the question. It was about how Discover uses artificial intelligence.
Topics that were once esoteric are now mainstream. There, you’ll find articles like “Microsoft’s AI Reaches an Indian Village,” and a worried Chicago chatbot ChatGPT spewing out her 14-page paper on the French Revolution to her sixth-grade girl. Sports include his radio presenter.
That fear prompted a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Sam Altman, founder of San Francisco startup OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT.
My colleagues at NewsGuard, who track online misinformation and assess the credibility of news sources, said Democratic Sen. I was happy to see you brought up the potential danger. She majored in psychology and neuroscience at New York University.
“A lot of the news is going to be generated by these systems,” said Marcus, who sat next to Altman. “They can’t be trusted. NewsGuard has already conducted a study that shows that 50 or so websites are already generated by bots. In fact, as more content is generated by untrusted systems, The quality of the whole news market of sorts will decline.”
In fact, NewsGuard identified over 125 websites with substantive content published in 10 languages and written by AI tools, ranging from news to lifestyle reports. These include a health information portal that published more than 50 of his AI-generated articles providing medical advice, including on subjects such as terminal bipolar disorder, some of which were inaccurate and It also contains bogus articles.
Some sites have fancy-sounding names such as News Live 79, Daily Business Post, iBusiness Day, Ireland Top News, Daily Time update, etc., and provide content about politics, entertainment, and travel, even if the content is bad. also contains harmless articles.
[ Jim Warren: NewsGuard tested ChatGPT’s potential for misinformation. Here’s what we found. ]
There may be information here and there that no human is involved (wording such as “You cannot complete this prompt”). More importantly, there are false claims, including celebrity death hoaxes and fabricated events.
CelebritiesDeaths.com, which publishes general obituaries and news about allegedly dead celebrities, announced in April 2023, “Biden has passed away. Acting President Harris speaks at 9 a.m. ET.” , reported that Joe Biden passed away peacefully in his sleep…”
As Bloomberg News wrote, NewsGuard’s work raises questions about “how this technology enhances established fraud techniques” and could abuse so-called programmatic advertising offered by ad tech companies. ing. That said, a dubious ‘news’ site could be flooded with ads due to a few simple prompts that created the site. Tech companies and advertisers are probably unwitting victims.
“A news-generating AI chatbot appears to finally be fulfilling[former Donald Trump aide]Kellyanne Conway’s vision of alternate facts by automating disinformation,” said Rich Niemand, a political and corporate strategist in Washington. ‘ said.
The new AI tools are “mushrooms masquerading as morels (edible fungi),” Niemand said. “In a society that lacks the intelligence of the mind and acts on relative ethics, it is harmful.”
For Tom Bowen, a political consultant in Chicago, the new tool significantly lowers the barriers to creating questionable websites for political campaigns. Sites based on such ideologies have proliferated, generally hiding the identity of their sponsors.
As with pornography, “propaganda activists are embracing new technology and often move faster than traditional journalists,” says Jeremy Gilbert. Gilbert is the Knight He Chair of Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and was previously a digital strategist at the Washington Post.
This is why NewsGuard and others “can play a valuable role in determining valuable sources of reliable news and information.”
“The same algorithms that generate text should be able to identify generated text,” Gilbert said. “His AI companies that provide these generating tools should also provide complementary detection systems so that propaganda and clickbait are less likely to spread.”
Like the confused captives of the “Silo,” man wants to be a friend of liberation, not an enemy that technology deceives.
Jim Warren is the former editor-in-chief of the Tribune and editor-in-chief of The NewsGuard.
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