Guarding the Gates of Knowledge

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From the original article

AI can fake a plausible paper at the push of a button. Can detection tools and peer review keep up?

A recent scroll through social media got me thinking about trust. About half my feed was filled with AI slop that astute users would call out as being machine-generated, often to the embarrassment of the rube who unknowingly spread it and sometimes to the delight of the poster who shared it deliberately because they found it amusing or useful for sowing confusion.

Remember the good old days of GPT-3 when we could ask the chatbot anything and it would almost instantly and very confidently spit back a plausible but false answer? That’s when the word “hallucination” as applied to AI answers entered the lexicon. Six years and several versions of a few different chatbots later, I still can’t trust the answers I get, even though Claude or Gemini often do useful work for me.

That’s the thing about current AI: Trust but verify. And verify you must.