But you are not doing a 2 hour rabbit hole search when you stand in front of a T-shirt and check whether it is fair traded or all-american produced.
But you are not doing a 2 hour rabbit hole search when you stand in front of a T-shirt and check whether it is fair traded or all-american produced.
If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt.
Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.
Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.
You are confusing who is the party that is injured--as many in this thread are. We are not talking about the consumer who buys a non-fairtrade t-shirt, when he would rather had a fairtrade one. It's about the t-shirt producers who is legitimately fairtrade but whose business is now in the shitter because of a lying AI.
LLMs can’t lie. They are incapable of telling either the truth or lying. To the extent that they are in any way useful, it’s recognizing that they are text generators attached to crawlers and other tools that can with the right inputs produce useful generated text that may also incidentally be correct or incorrect.
Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.
To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.