Friday, March 01, 2024

How bad is Google's Gemini? Bad enough to call it 'Google's AI-Powered Libel Machine'

And I hope he and everyone else so screwed by this mess sues them.
None of this happened! Though it sounds vaguely like a headline for an article I might have written, there was never a Rolling Stone piece called “The Great California Water Heist,” and I’d never heard of the “Compton Pledge.”

More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles. One entry claimed I got in trouble for a piece called “Glenn Beck’s War on Comedy,” after suggesting “a connection between a conservative donor, Foster Friess, and a left-wing activist group, the Ruckus Society.”

With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t “learn,” but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry. “The Great California Water Heist” turned into “The Great California Water Purge: How Nestle Bottled Its Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire—and Lied About It.” The “article” apparently featured this passage:

Look, if Nestle wants to avoid future public-relations problems, it should probably start by hiring executives whose noses aren’t shaped like giant penises.

I wouldn’t call that a good impersonation of my writing style, but it’s close enough that some would be fooled, which seems to be the idea.
...
Now it was horror time. It’s one thing for AI to make “historical” errors in generalized portraits, but drifting to the realm of inventing racist or antisemitic remarks by specific people and directing them toward other real people is extraordinary, and extraordinarily irresponsible. What if the real-life Smith saw this? Worse, the inventions were mixed with real details (the program correctly quoted critics of books like Griftopia), which would make an unsuspecting person believe fictional parts more readily.


This is doing real harm now; consider that some idiots are saying that journalists should use this mess in writing articles...  I wonder if someone using this to write a piece that flat lies about someone- as this did about Taibbi- when they knew the system, to be polite, has some bugs in it, that just might pass the line to allow someone to sue the journalist and any media he works for.

1 comment:

Matthew W said...

AI is now, and most likely will always be just left wing computer programming.