Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 15457345234 864 days ago
When you ask an AI for a list of citations and it returns a list of 10 names, pages and dates no amount of 'critical thinking' will let you determine which answers are correct or incorrect, you have to sit there and painfully cross-reference each one.

The 'critical thinking' part at this point in time leads you to only one conclusion: that the tool is unreliable and dangerous and shouldn't be used. Or, you're teaching kids that they need to cross-reference all 'authoritative sources' which leads to a complete failure of the system - if you give kids a textbook will they have been 'trained' by GPT to not believe a word of any of the claims in it without cross-referencing? How does that enable better education.

If you provide a tool from a position of authority it needs to be a reliable and believable tool; standing in a position of authority and handing out access (to children!) to a lie box and asking those children to 'rely on it' is frankly abusive. That's beyond mixed messaging, that's just some form of weird mental torture.
2 comments
verisimi 864 days ago
The world is a lie box. Gpt is a new and surprising iteration, which takes up a lot of the legwork out of the nonsense generation business.
link
singularity2001 864 days ago
checking the first source to see that it's none existing will (hopefully) teach you a lesson
link
15457345234 864 days ago
But if the second and third and fourth source exists (let us suppose the 5th doesn't) what will the kids trust, the AI or the search engine? We all know that google is becoming crap and high schools on average don't have a 'proper' library so... Will they assume the first source exists but isn't indexed?

I just think it's a real issue to give kids free access to a tool that so confidently makes stuff up. I know that textbooks aren't perfect but they're at least audited by a committee of experts, mistakes slip in but there's oversight, there's a procedure to ensure that they're reliable representations of (currently understood) facts, and that when politics enters the textbook production process it (correctly) becomes a bit of a national scandal.

link