Noteworthy News

[Angrboda]

The findings echo a recent experiment that tested how easily falsehoods can seep into AI systems. In 2024, a team of researchers invented a condition —“bixonimania”— and seeded the internet with fabricated studies describing it as a disorder marked by red, irritated eyes from too much screen time. They didn’t exactly try to hide the ruse.

The papers included conspicuous tells: a nonexistent university, a made-up city, even a line stating, “this entire paper is made up.” It didn’t matter. Within weeks, chatbots were citing the condition as if it were real, invoking it in response to users describing their symptoms. A study published in January in the Lancet suggests the problem is not an isolated quirk. The most reliable chatbot the researchers tested still treated more than 10 percent of fabricated claims as true with the worst accepting more than half.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/20...-accurate/

This reminds me of the fact that Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, is partly trained upon posts in the public X feed. This seems a recipe for a vicious feedback loop wherein X misinformation becomes right-wing dogma through being given the stamp of authoritativeness by Grok. This in addition to the other problems in Grok thanks to Musk's team meddling in the algorithm to produce specific results.