A.I. it’s still Awful Internet
Greetings, my fellow readers! It’s been a while, and my dear fans threatened to desert Medium if I didn’t conjure up a new article pronto. Medium has been kind to me, so here’s my latest offering to keep the Medium ship sailing.
And this isn’t just another run-of-the-mill article about politics or critical thinking, although, well, the latter part isn’t entirely true.
Let’s talk about A.I., more specifically, the hype surrounding it. If the information out there is any indication, we might as well all become golf enthusiasts because A.I. is poised to take over every aspect of our lives, from creativity to buying groceries, and yes, even perfecting that golf swing.
Here’s what one of the top A.I. apps, Bing powered by Chat-GPT-4, can do with a simple question.
We start with a straightforward query: “What was the big happening in 1825?” A question that even a pre-Gen Z history student could have asked Google back in the day. But with A.I., we expect a tailored, verified, and intelligent response instead of a list of URL’s.
And voilà! Bing provides an intelligent summary of significant events in 1825. No need to surf websites; we’ve got our answer. Learning has never been easier! VivAI!
Then again, that’s not exactly true right? One might for instance object to the description of the forcedd relocation and someone might ask: “ The Erie Canal was finally completed? Why ‘finally’? Did it take 8 years? Is that reasonable? If not why not? But ok, these are also questions for further research. And then there is this deep insight: “These events had a profound impact on the course of history”. Really? How so?
But … hang-on a sec…., did you spot a glitch? I didn’t check Bing’s answers, assuming it couldn’t mess up looking up historical events that took place in a single specific year.
But leave it to A.I. It did mess up.
Jefferson and Adams didn’t die in 1825, and the Declaration of Independence wasn’t approved in 1775! But that is exactly what Bing says!
And guess what? The first reference that Bing provides (eventshistory.com) lists the first three events on its 1825 page….and the event about Jefferson and Adam’s demise? It’s on their 1826 page.
A 6 year-old wouldn’t make such mistake.
Seeing that A.I. can mess-up even the simplest of data look-ups, we must, and I mean: must, check everything A.I. says. Our default position must be: A.I. can be wrong. Even if most of what it comes up with is correct. If it cannot handle a simple look-up, it is untrustworthy.
So, my dear Medium-er, keep your critical thinking cap on.
By the way….. I did give this this article a run through ChatGPT 😉, so if you spot any errors…you can blame….me.
Also: No, Medium has done bugger all promoting my articles and I haven’t made a dollar on this platform, thanks for asking. I wrote this article under the illusion that I know better than Medium, its editors and its algorithms and that one day Medium will catch-up.
Make this a great week if you can, and why not do something different today and give this 26 claps instead of the customary 1 or 50?
Mitch
🌐 Sources
[The article contains information from various sources, not explicitly cited.]
