Do you trust AI when it comes to politics?

[noname223]

Honestly, my answer is no. If I have the choice I prefer reading the newspaper or scientific articles. Even wikipedia.

I researched politics on controversial topics (Ukraine war) and I had the feeling chatGPT had a lot of inaccuracies. I also read AI chatbots are trained with a lot of Russian misinformation. Could be true. Moreover, billionaires own these companies.

I have the feeling the opinions/facts I receive vary a lot when I compare grok, chatGPT and Perplexity. All with their own biases.

The irony is: I used AI to give me ideas for college papers on politics. Or to sum up texts. I was under so much pressure to deliver. In some ways I also wanted to get caught so that I don't have to endure the college torture I experienced.

I never got a mark worse than 1,7 on a sclae of 1,0 to 5,0 though. The third best mark one can get. When I used AI. But I also thought a lot about it and refined it. But I think my lecturers were smart enough to notice I cheated.

For own research on politics I prefer to watch lengthy politics videos or lectures. If I am actually interested in a topic and under no time pressure I won't use AI. But if I am under time pressure, or want to sum up texts I might use it.

I quit college though. My mental health deteriorated too much. I read students with huge self-doubts into their own capabilities have too much faith in the text of AI. Which might be true in my case.

Which experiences have you made?

 

[Hvergelmir]

I don't trust any single source when it comes to politics. I do find that ChatGPT have been very good at providing different perspectives and explanations, though.
I find it especially valuable on sensitive topics, where people are both biased and emotional.

If I want my thoughts and beliefs challenged, i trust ChatGPT to help with that. If I care about accuracy and truth, I dive into the sources.

I'm not personally using AI to summarize things I have sources for. I think it's best for surface level research, suggestions, and brainstorming, and solutions that can be quickly tested.

 

[Dejected 55]

Consider... I used to sell stuff on eBay, I often had lower prices go unsold for the exact same items other people were selling for much higher. What did I notice? Other people's for sale posts had lots of misspellings. Most people seem to be kind of stupid... so me using proper grammar and spelling in all my listings meant most people weren't even seeing them because they were searching for misspelled words. I actually had to start including intentionally misspelled keywords in my listings to increase traffic. Spoiler... It worked!

Google... search results don't show you the best results. They show you the "most popular" ones. Ignore the sponsored links that people/companies can pay for... what Google generally serves you up aren't necessarily the best match for your search, but rather what most other people who searched for something similar clicked on... So, if most other people didn't click on the best answer... you aren't getting the best answer when you search.

Family Feud... they preface every round with "100 people were surveyed, top XX answers are on the board." Think about that for a minute. The game isn't using the top XX accurate answers... just the top XX answers given by people in the survey. If the people in the survey were idiots, you get shit answers that will be almost impossible for intelligent people to guess. SCTV or some show like that back in the 1980s did a parody game show based on the premise that they surveyed 100 teenagers or something, with the poignant bit being none of the answers were correct... so people guessing smart answers never hit one... so contestants then started trying to guess the stupidest things they could think of!

NBC back in the mid 1980s had a game show based on Scrabble. Chuck Woolery hosted. In the beginning the way the game worked was, Chuck would give you a horrible pun/wordplay as a clue. If you could guess, cool... if not you had to pick tiles. There were always a couple of tiles that were not in the word ("stoppers") so you couldn't just keep drawing tiles and using the letters if you drew one of those. So, once you guessed the word, that wasn't enough. You had to spell it by filling in the missing letters when you guessed. So, if you guess early you had to know how to spell the word. It was FUCKING HILARIOUS how many people knew the word, couldn't spell for shit, and had to keep taking turns using the "stoppers" that they didn't know weren't in there. The audience would groan, Woolery was frustrated. They quickly changed the rule so you didn't have to be able to spell the word to win.

My point here is... The AI is using the existing Internet to provide you answers... which means it is using all the incorrect and most-searched and misspelled shit that everyone is putting in there. I don't know why anyone would trust the AI to do a better search than you, because at least you have a shot at recognizing a shit search result and trying again or scrolling to a different link... whereas the AI is going to use whatever its algorithm is and you don't know whether it based its answer on good or bad data.

 

[Hvergelmir]

The AI is using the existing Internet to provide you answers...

It's a bit more complicated than that. Where AI truly excel is in it's ability to pull information from different sources.
Rather than checking the the most popular results, it checks all of them, including references, and research papers, and presents some kind of coherent summary.

I'm admittedly simplifying a bit, and the details depends on which AI we're talking about. Among other things, subject experts are often employed to both write training materials and validate training.
Either way it gives more depth and more width, than any google search, and it's significantly faster than doing thorough research.
It also have the ability to answer context specific, wide or vague things that a search engine can't.

It's not a replacement for research, but a complement to surface searches.
Try it next time you got something that is hard to google.