Yeah, I think that’s definitely only a correlation. They’re both probably caused by lack of critical thinking and poor ability to assess risk.
Precisely. The AI is not causing people to be dumber, it’s just dumber people use AI and also believe vaccine disinformation.
Make sense to me. All those charts you see about AI and political bias don’t take into account the fact that this bias would be influenced by the user, can eventually supersede the base instructions*. It’s only a matter of time before the chatbot says, “you’re right about vaccines and the JQ, would you like a bleach recipe?”
Chatbots might skew liberal in a laboratory setting, but they are built for sycophancy towards their userbase, not the labs.
* Insultingly, chatbot companies call this natural and unavoidable process “jailbreaking” as if it’s not inherent to their product.
It’s not only inherent to the technology, it is actively trained, as sycophancy brings more engagement…
Explains a lot about why every person I met that religiously use LLMs for personal use have been bumbling fucking morons.
Dumb people believe dumb things
To the surprise of nobody, people that only get information from sources that validate their own beliefs (in this case social media and corporate LLMs), ends up believing all kinds of hoaxes.
I would not be surprised to find similar rates among people that only rely on religious figures for health matters.
Shocking that systems trained in misinformation will spout misinformation.
LLMs aren’t really fun to talk to. The novelty of interacting with a computer like Kevin Flynn in Tron fades quickly when you realize everything is now that directions game for school where you have to say each step in order.
It can be used successfully but you need to instruct it to only rely on science that can be shown in studies, just tell it the facts, give it your data, and ask a non-leading question, and finally confirm with a doctor. Research I did with frontier models when my parents were in hospital likely saved both of their lives. I think the HMO employed doctor (same one both times) was actively trying to kill them. Using them against my own medical records turned up ideas that my doctors missed but agreed to when brought up.
It is an interesting use case. When A.I. first really became a thing I put in my symptoms and it told me I have a combination of three health conditions. Went to a doctor, specifically asked for those tests, and I had 2/3. These were very obscure conditions that doctors don’t normally test for or know about, and up 'till then I’d assumed it was all in my head. But if I’d blindly trusted it I’d think I had an extra condition.
Yes blindly trusting it is not a good idea, but for complex issues it’s very good at taking reams of data and synthesizing it into likely diagnosis. Far better than humans in my experience, probably mostly because humans don’t have the time to review your full medical history or case history on an issue: AI can hold all that and examine it together. It’s made very important diagnoses for me at least. As long as there’s a real doctor in the loop, it works great as a second opinion to fill in gaps that the doctor may have missed.
