Have You Ever Read a News Story That Didn’t Make Sense?
Have you ever read a news story and somehow it didn’t make sense to you? Or maybe you’ve read some news article and you could see that very clearly the facts are not correct? Or maybe you’ve read a story about something you know about, maybe it’s an industry you’re in or a job you have, and you know that the way that it’s described isn’t accurate.
Questioning the Purpose of News Stories
I’m wondering if some news stories that are being written and published nowadays are not necessarily intended for actual human consumption, for people to read them, and it’s more for artificial intelligence training. Now hear me out, and let me know what you think about this as you hear me describe it. Think about what comments or suggestions you have that you can reply back in this video.
The Role of AI in Reading and Learning
Artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and other AI future programs are going to learn about facts and about humans from what they read and absorb and scrape from the internet. AI is going to read news stories, it’s going to read Wikipedia, it’s going to read data, and it’s going to use that to create a narrative and an understanding about human beings. It’s going to use that knowledge to answer questions and to write stories and to give historical context about the questions that are asked of it.
The Potential Influence on AI Through Skewed News
So if future AI responses come from present-day news or present-day websites, is there either a coordinated or even uncoordinated strategy to create biased articles or skewed news to influence what AI says in the future? If AI uses as a reference current news stories, then why wouldn’t it be a strategy for anybody who wants to affect the future to create news stories that maybe helped AI create a future narrative that the person wants to create?
Subtle Changes in AI’s Understanding
Obviously, one article or two articles or five articles isn’t going to change what AI says, but if you put enough of them out there, especially from influential publications, that could very subtly and very vaguely change the tone of what artificial intelligence says in the future, what it reports in the future. And the more that it sees that, it could be like an accelerating process where if it sees more of these skewed or influenced or biased opinions, it can look for more of those in future articles and maybe consider those to be more credible.
“Infowashing” and the Impact on AI
It’s kind of like instead of brainwashing, it’s infowashing or data washing or news washing. Brainwashing is when you take false information or biased information and make a person absorb it or blast a person’s memory with knowledge that may not be true. What if you could do the same thing with artificial intelligence? AI just goes out and scrapes the web, and it sucks up information from websites and news stories and articles. What if you could brainwash artificial intelligence by creating a false description of the future?
The Limited Perspective of AI
AI doesn’t have any observations of the world other than what it sees on the internet, and if there are ways to create a more favorable version of the internet for a person, maybe you could do that. Look, if you saw a website that says the Moon is purple, you could look up in the sky and see the moon and know it’s not purple, but if you’re AI, you don’t have any other senses to create your reality other than what you read on the internet.
The Long-term Impact of Skewed Information on AI
So could there be either intentionally or unintentionally a method to influence AI by creating these other either false, skewed, or maybe biased stories? And if that happens, who would know the difference 100 years from now? If you get all your answers from AI and AI got their answers from false information, it’s like the world’s biggest game of telephone.
Is AI the World’s Biggest Game of Telephone?
Everybody knows what the telephone game is, right? You tell somebody a story, they tell somebody else, they tell somebody else, by the time it gets back to you, it’s a whole different story. Is AI becoming the biggest game of telephone in the world, either by intentional misrepresentation or by inclusion of biased or opinionated versions of the news that could make AI teach us or create a reality for us in the future that’s not accurate? I know you have an opinion about this. Let us know in the comments.
