Saturday, November 9, 2024

Google’s AI summaries are a disservice to humanity — Carol Phelps

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As a teacher and parent, I am strongly against artificial intelligence summaries of any information by Google.

I say that not just because AI sometimes gets it completely wrong, but because it is extremely ill-advised to entrust artificial intelligence with the responsibility of creating our understanding and knowledge of the world.

Humans tend to be hurried and lazy, and they are only too happy to take as definitive fact whatever AI may present to them first. Many if not most “truths,” “facts” and “opinions” in life are messy and complicated, with pros and cons and divergent views even among the experts, never mind the entire population of the globe.

It takes more than a brief AI summary to capture any of that nuance, even if AI miraculously managed to pick ideal material from ideal sources, which it does not. One might call AI summaries the worst misuse of crowdsourcing to date.

It’s the height of human arrogance for Google to think the sum of human thought and knowledge about any topic on Earth should be churned around by a computer and spit out as a handy paragraph that any gullible person will be inclined to believe.

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