[noduerme]

I'm more concerned that only a small percentage of people will actually check the citations (or the code) before putting the AI's results into circulation. Sort of similar to how people retweet or forward misinformation, thus lending it a personal stamp of human approval. When it comes from someone you know, most people don't check every reference. The scale of the fact-checking problem on social media and in academic papers is already obvious, along with its societal ramifications, but the addition of machines that gleefully spew factual-sounding garbage with false citations just puts that into overdrive.

I'm not afraid of a few people calling out that the AI is wrong. It's much scarier to envision a world where no one even tries to debunk AI-generated false facts. Part of what was so maddening about this conversation with Bing was the idea that it was rewriting history. Without recourse to Archive.org, could I have even proven that it was wrong or that the page hadn't existed? Since it's the kind of a thing a human would be very unlikely to just make up, it sounds more plausible; but then false assertions will be built upon other false assertions, until historical fact is buried under a mountain of hallucinated documents.