On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.
The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.
ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.
On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.
The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.
ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.