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Misinformation and Disinformation: AI: Artificial Intelligence

Information on misinformation and disinformation and methods to identify such sources.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

John McCarthy, the founder of the field of Artificial Intelligence stated that “It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.” – What is AI/Basic Questions. (n.d.). Professor John McCarthy. Retrieved 2024, July 22, from http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-intelligence/what-is-ai/index.html  

Reasons AI Hallucinates

Generative AI systems can produce inaccurate and biased content for several reasons:

Training Data Sources: Generative AI models are trained on vast amounts of internet data which contains both accurate and inaccurate information, as well as biases (Weise & Metz, 2023).

Limitations of Generative Models: Their goal is to generate plausible content, not to verify its truth. As a result, they might produce content that sounds plausible but is inaccurate (O’Brien, 2023).

Inherent Challenges in AI Design: AI tools are not designed to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not true. Even if a tool is given only accurate data, it can still generate , new, potentially inaccurate content (Weise & Metz, 2023).

Explanations and citations from When AI Gets It Wrong: Addressing AI Hallucinations and Bias. (2024). MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies. Retrieved 2024, July 23 from https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/basics/addressing-ai-hallucinations-and-bias/

 

When is it safe to use ChatGTP?

When is it safe to use ChatGTP Flowchart

Flowchart from Artificial Intelligence Writing Tools (n.d.) Simon Fraser University Centre for Educational Excellence. Retrieved 2024, July 23. from https://www.sfu.ca/cee/teaching-resources/teaching-strategies/AI-writing-tools.html.

Common AI Terms

Machine Learning is “a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that focuses on the using data and algorithms to enable AI to imitate the way that humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy.” What is Machine Learning (ML)? (n.d.). IBM. Retrieved 2024, July 22 from https://www.ibm.com/topics/machine-learning.

Large language models (LLMs) “are a category of foundation models trained on immense amounts of data making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other types of content to perform a wide range of tasks.” What are Large Language Models (LLM)? (n.d.). IBM. Retrieved 2024, July 22 from  https://www.ibm.com/topics/large-language-models.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is “a machine-learning model that is trained to create new data, rather than making a prediction about a specific dataset. A generative AI system is one that learns to generate more objects that look like the data it was trained on.” Zewe, A. (2023, November 9). Explained: Generative AI. MIT News. Retrieved 2024, July 22 from  https://news.mit.edu/2023/explained-generative-ai-1109.

Prompts are “the information, sentences, or questions that you enter into a Generative AI tool…” Getting started with prompts for text-based Generative AI tools. (2023, August 30). Harvard University Information Technology. Retrieved 2024, July 22 from https://huit.harvard.edu/news/ai-prompts.

Hallucination is a generated, “fabricated information in response to a user’s prompt, but presents it as if it’s factual and correct.” DeVon, C. (2023, December 22). AI chatbots can ‘hallucinate’ and make things up—why it happens and how to spot it. CNBC. Retrieved 2024, July 22 from  https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/why-ai-chatbots-hallucinate.html.

How will Artificial Intelligence Change the World

Books on AI at UA-PTC Libraries

Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight

Training AI How to Think: Explained

Media Literacy in an AI World

AI is Dangerous but Not for the Reasons You Think

E-books on AI @ UA-PTC Libraries

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