Judge decides case based on AI-hallucinated case law

[The Firebird]

The whole distrust of media thing is important for this conversation because we’re becoming more aware how biased most news media are. They may be biases we can live with - the BBC is pro-UK-establishment, Al-Jazeera is pro-Qatari-establishment - but they’re there and in some cases there’s more bias than news. So there’s no real objective trusted source for truth or what happened, and we should be even more aware from genAI which draws from those sources can be even more warped and biased depending on the designer’s intent.

It also recently made me think about a recent minor scandal in autobiographies - it turns out The Salt Path, a series of life-affirming autobiographies about a couple walking about England because they don’t have any money, is written by a pair of fraudsters - and the response from publishing that they basically don’t fact check books and don’t consider that to be their job, caveat emptor. Or about the estimate that about 50% of artworks for sale on the international market are fake (as in, not by the creator they purport to be by) and the common practice of museums and galleries of unofficially displaying copies of major artworks to preserve the originals. What can we trust to be real? What sort of authenticity are we paying for?

Aye. I'll add the replication crisis, not to mention the amount of outright fraud, in scientific publishing.

 

[trappedslider]

And it will only improve. See the internet 30 years ago vs now.

Not everyone would call it an improvement

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Not everyone would call it an improvement

But nearly noone will keep doing things the 1990 way, sending snail mail, doing research in a library, publishing ads to hire people in a newspaper, ordering over the phone, go to the train station to book a ticket, go to the travel agent office to book your hotel, go to the videoclub to rent a film... despite those means still existing.

 

[The Firebird]

With enough practice and effort, they believe (BELIEVE, note, it's not yet proven, but it is proven that they are trying) that they can bias LLMs to specific viewpoints without impairing their ability to recommend a dishwasher. Already LLMs are significantly biased just based on the sources they've been fed, but it's sufficiently similar to media bias that we don't talk about it much (and also, because they just took everything that wasn't nailed down, it's broad-based). Also, we've seen that, for a lot of media sources, you can achieve and (for now) maintain 3 without 2. The NYT has proven this repeatedly. The last three-to-five years have seen the NYT involved in wildly inaccurate and obviously biased reporting countless times (far more than say, the entire thirty years before that), including repeating outright lies and fictions as if they were researched facts. Maybe people will stop believing them eventually but it doesn't seem to have happened. BBC News has been even worse (and bad for nearly twenty years now), but continues to be treated as "trustworthy" more because it's sort of meme than a fact.

And a distrust of media, which is, I admit, setting in (and has been for a couple of decades) just leaves a vacuum - a vacuum that podcasters, TikTokers, and LLMs are absolutely filling - and audiences are showing they aren't particularly more interested in truth than nonsense (Joe Rogan would not be the most popular podcaster in the US if people didn't love absolute and total nonsense - he's the direct podcast equivalent of your friend-of-a-friend's pothead older brother who said told you Mayans invented cellphones).

Agree that some news orgs have not done their diligence on some stories. I disagree that this hasn't had an impact.

I think the reasonable read on this scenario is to say "people will not trust anyone based on authority", not "people are going to blindly trust LLMs".

 

[jian]

Agree that some news orgs have not done their diligence on some stories. I disagree that this hasn't had an impact.

I think the reasonable read on this scenario is to say "people will not trust anyone based on authority", not "people are going to blindly trust LLMs".

Yes, news media haven't really been able to do decent fact checking for about 30 years. I think I remember a book (mainly about the Daily Mail) from 1998 or so stating that the average time given for a UK newspaper article writer to check the facts on what they were writing was 5 minutes. It's probably more like 5 seconds now. As with publishers, many news outlets just don't consider fact-checking to be part of their job.

What it comes down to is that we basically can't take anything we see on the internet (and media in general) as fact unless it's corroborated by multiple independent sources who aren't using the same damn source for their reporting (and that means, for instance, that early breaking news is inherently unreliable for several hours). I think we're getting to the point that the only thing that's authentic - at least artistically - is what you witness with your own senses, whether it's a real event or a live performance, and we all have to do our own fact-checking, as difficult as that is, because nobody else will do it for us.

 

[Ryujin]

This doesn't follow. Grok being a black box did not stop us from detecting its bias. If the output is biased, we can observe it. If it's not observable, then not an issue

Because it was done with all the finesse of a crowbar to the back of the head. Fear when it's done artfully.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They may be biases we can live with - the BBC is pro-UK-establishment, Al-Jazeera is pro-Qatari-establishment - but they’re there and in some cases there’s more bias than news.

The BBC is wildly more biased than that - the pro-UK-establishment bias (I mean, Laura Kuenssberg still has a job solely because she's mates with the right people, despite being perhaps the least insightful person to grace her role in the last forty years) is just the longest-term and most continuous one, give it has persisted for pretty much the entire time the BBC has existed. But in the last twenty years a lot of other biases have emerged, which I won't list fully because a couple of them border on politics, and they've also been fairly consistent and pretty strong. The strongest is probably anti-protest, closely followed by pro-cop. The BBC is constitutionally incapable of reporting honestly on any kind of protest in the UK, no matter how popular, and often has a BBC "expert" interject to imply or even outright state protest is a useless waste of time that responsible adults should eschew, or any story involving the UK police screwing up, which will be softballed even if the cop is literally a murdering monster. This does probably relate to the pro-UK-establishment bias, but both specific sub-biases have become much stronger over the last twenty years. They used to at least pretend protests were sometimes valid and cops could be bad.

I will say it is hilarious to compare BBC coverage re: a certain specific major and frequent news topic from the last two months to the nearly three years before that, if that isn't proof that bias was intentional and ordered from the top, not just systemic or inherent to the structure of the organisation, I don't know what is. It's like someone flicked a light switch.

 

[jian]

The BBC is wildly more biased than that - the pro-UK-establishment bias (I mean, Laura Kuenssberg still has a job solely because she's mates with the right people, despite being perhaps the least insightful person to grace her role in the last forty years) is just the longest-term and most continuous one, give it has persisted for pretty much the entire time the BBC has existed. But in the last twenty years a lot of other biases have emerged, which I won't list fully because a couple of them border on politics, and they've also been fairly consistent and pretty strong. The strongest is probably anti-protest, closely followed by pro-cop. The BBC is constitutionally incapable of reporting honestly on any kind of protest in the UK, no matter how popular, and often has a BBC "expert" interject to imply or even outright state protest is a useless waste of time that responsible adults should eschew, or any story involving the UK police screwing up, which will be softballed even if the cop is literally a murdering monster. This does probably relate to the pro-UK-establishment bias, but both specific sub-biases have become much stronger over the last twenty years. They used to at least pretend protests were sometimes valid and cops could be bad.

I will say it is hilarious to compare BBC coverage re: a certain specific major and frequent news topic from the last two months to the nearly three years before that, if that isn't proof that bias was intentional and ordered from the top, not just systemic or inherent to the structure of the organisation, I don't know what is. It's like someone flicked a light switch.

Yeah, I totally agree with all that. The BBC has basically always loved cops and hated protests - I can’t remember a time in my life (I’m 50) it didn’t - and all of that reinforced bias got worse under Thatcher and Blair (or maybe I should say Campbell) before getting driven further south by the Tories (especially Johnson’s campaign on the BBC) and then Labour again. I personally shelved it under pro-establishment bias as you say but maybe a better phrase would be pro-authority.

 

[Umbran]

You don’t need to bribe it. The bias is introduced by the data it is trained on. And then, since it’s a black box, it’s impossible to detect.

Well, pretty much impossible for the typical individual user.
Not at all impossible for a statistician with some time on their hands.

 

[Umbran]

A medical AI trained by the national public health service would be far less susceptible to being manipulated by corporate interest.

A generative AI built by a government or government agency can only be trusted as far as your government can be trusted.

I cannot say more than that, or it will be politics.