Generative AI generates real worries of identity privacy and data accuracy

livemint.com:

Bard, a Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, had resulted in a much more formidable competitor to the Microsoft-backed Open AI’s ChatGPT. Google’s new model is called Gemini, and it can work with video, images, and of course text, and is an attempt to re-establish Google as a world leader in AI. The model is already available in over 170 largely English-speaking countries and comes as an add-on to Bard.

According to Google, as of 13 December, application programming interfaces (APIs) to this system will be made available to software developers for use in their own systems. Google’s initial attempts earlier this year to prove that it had an answer to ChatGPT were a fiasco. Its parent company, Alphabet, lost $100 billion in market value in the wake of a fouled-up demonstration that gave a wrong answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

In one of its answers, Bard said the telescope was used to take the first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, but America’s space agency Nasa confirmed that those were taken by a different telescope. The paradox is that Bard’s learning engine could have found that out by, well, just googling it. To my mind, this proves an inescapable truth about using Generative AI chatbots to replace search engines for thorough and factually accurate searches.

The logic in these chatbot’s programs would cause them to make up an answer they didn’t directly have in their learning repository. This is because they are trained essentially as ‘autocomplete’ programs: i.e., they are trained to ‘generate’ a response which may be factually suspect, especially when their knowledge base is incomplete or incorrect. Many are quick to point out that this sort of technology is