How is this different from, forever?
Back in the old days, I'd get a book out of the library. How do I know if the content is 'real info' or not?
If a friend gives some advice, how do I know if it is well reasoned, tried and tested advice, or just opinion?
So were those books, opinions or recent internet searches flagged?
I think the 'flagging' is up to us as individuals. If you aren't asking something determinate, like an arithmetic problem, and it is important to you, it's up to you to work to validate the veracity of the reply.
If we are going to leave that up to others, it gets tricky very fast. Now you are leaving the determination of what is 'true' up to others. We can never be certain they don't have a bias, or an agenda. "Let the buyer beware". Always.
I think it is different. With a book, you can check footnotes. You can talk to the author. If they say they talked to so-and-so, you can verify that with so-and-so. If they say they used an original source, like a newspaper, you could go find that paper newspaper article.
It is much more difficult these days. You cannot speak to the folks producing the AI - that is about as easy as correcting inaccurate information about you on the internet, or removing oneself complete from social platforms. An author monetized their books by getting people to buy their books. On the internet, people monetize via clicks and followers, so the goal is to do and say anything in a way that gets lots of clicks and followers, no matter how inaccurate. Now multiply this by millions and it becomes much harder to weed through things.
You had a gatekeeper for books, the publishers. They knew they could be held accountable, so were much more careful in what they wanted to publish - or we willing to take responsibility for what was published. Not so much with the content platforms today.
Not only can AI produce fake things or misinformation, but it can be used to make real things look fake. I will just say there were high profile incidents caught on video that were real, but some people claimed were faked, and they were promoted as such by large portions of the media. I will say no further as it gets into politics.
I agree with doing your own research and validation, that has not changed. But people are no longer trained or taught to do that. Social media has trained folks to have a much shorter attention span and focus. And remember - EVERYONE has a bias and agenda, that is what you can be certain of
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I'm less concerned about AI providing biased, or incorrect information in a search situation. We've been dealing with misinformation for centuries.
Where I do find AI exciting is the opportunities in streamlining everyday life, manufacturing, delivery of goods, robotics and just general automation of things.
Marc Andreessen recently claimed that AI will improve things so much that everything will be incredibly cheap and no one will have to work. That's quite a stretch IMO, but I can see how he got there.
Mods: your job here is safe! (For now anyway.
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I am not sure about this. Since the early days of IT in the 70s I have hearing about advancements that will "make things cheap and no one will have to work". I have yet to see that, outside of technology hardware being cheaper. But the software and processes running on those platforms are not necessarily making things cheaper to the end user. It s making it cheaper for the producer, primarily in needing fewer people (as that is the biggest expense for the vast majority of companies). Wages have not exactly grown to match that advancement. And the people who do not have to work are not exactly living lives of luxury (other than the FIREd and soon-to-be FIREd folks on this forum
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. But honestly I’ve seen articles that bad pre-AI.
