AI’s promotion of ‘fake news’ erodes everyday thinking, MIT study reveals

Yet another study shows that the more you let artificial intelligence do the thinking for you, the less capable you are on your own.

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The study out of the MIT Media Lab tracked 67 participants over four weeks as they evaluated news headlines and images, saying whether they believed they were real or fake, sometimes with the assistance of an AI chatbot. When they had the chatbot’s help, participants were 21% more accurate in finding fake news with the AI’s help—but at the end of the study, a troubling side effect emerged.

By week four of the study, participants’ unassisted ability to identify fake news had declined by 15 percentage points compared to their scores before the experiment started. Their confidence, however, increased: a quarter of participants said they felt their detection abilities had improved, even as their performance got worse.

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“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs, but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” [said Anku Rani, the co-lead author of the study].

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here