Grok and Groupthink: Why AI is Getting Less Reliable, Not More (Time) [View all]

[usonian]

https://time.com/7302830/why-ai-is-getting-less-reliable/

Last week, we conducted a test that found five leading AI models—including Elon Musk’s Grok—correctly debunked 20 of President Donald Trump’s false claims. A few days later, Musk retrained Grok with an apparent right-wing update, promising that users “should notice a difference.” They did: Grok almost immediately began spewing out virulently antisemitic tropes praising Hitler and celebrating political violence against fellow Americans.

Musk’s Grok fiasco is a wakeup call. Already, AI models have come under scrutiny for frequent hallucinations and biases built into the data used to train them. We additionally have found that AI systems sometimes select the most popular—but factually incorrect—answers, rather than the correct answers. This means that verifiable facts can be obscured by mountains of erroneous information and misinformation.


Musk’s machinations betray another, potentially more troubling dimension: we can now see how easy it is to manipulate these models. Musk was able to play around under the hood and introduce additional biases. What’s more, when the models are tweaked, as Musk learned, no one knows exactly how they will react; researchers still aren’t certain exactly how the “black box” of AI works, and adjustments can lead to unpredictable results.

The chatbots’ vulnerability to manipulation, along with their susceptibility to groupthink and their inability to recognize basic facts, should alarm all of us about the growing reliance on these research tools in industry, education, and the media.

OPINION:

It's software. Nothing could possibly go wrong. But seriously, current LLM's are entirely reflections of the data that's fed to them, and the biases of the programmers.

Worse, succeeding models feed on the spew of preceding ones.

This would seem to argue for LLM's trained and programmed on narrow verticals. But with the current high cost and extreme power consumption, payback on such more trustworthy focused models seems unlikely.

Electrical power is money and money is God.