How Deep Is Your Chat?

Welcome

Article from Issue 279/2024

Author(s): Joe Casad

Books, academic journals, tech blogs, and social media posts have been trumpeting dire warnings about super-intelligent AI systems snuffing out civilization.

Dear Reader,

Books, academic journals, tech blogs, and social media posts have been trumpeting dire warnings about super-intelligent AI systems snuffing out civilization. This certainly is a real problem – I don't want to make light of it. But another serious, and perhaps more immediate, problem is really stupid, inept AI systems messing things up through sheer incompetence.

The Washington Post had a story recently [1] about a study by a European nonprofit [2] on the trouble AI chatbots had with answering basic questions about political elections. According to the story, Bing's AI chatbot, which is now called Microsoft Copilot, "gave inaccurate answers to one out of every three basic questions about candidates, polls, scandals, and voting in a pair of recent election cycles in Germany and Switzerland."

[...]

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