AI IS REWRITING THE INTERNET

Big players, including Microsoft, with its Bing AI (and Copilot), Google, with Bard, and OpenAI, with ChatGPT-4, are making AI chatbot technology previously restricted to test labs more accessible to the general public.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language and that these programs analyze the statistical properties of the language to make educated guesses based on the words you have typed previously.

These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of facts to draw on, just the ability to write reasonable-sounding statements.

This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds reasonable does not guarantee its factuality. But there are so many more pieces to the AI landscape that are coming into play.