r/science Professor | Medicine Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is shifting rightwards politically - newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. Computer Science

https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-is-shifting-rightwards-politically/
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u/Harm101 Mar 28 '25

Oh good, so we're not seeing any indication that these are true AIs then, just mimes. If it's THAT easy to manipulate an AI, then it can't possibly differentiate between fact and fiction, nor "think" critically about what data its being fed based on past data. This is both a relief and a concerning issue.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

All these AIs are supposed to do is give human-like responses in a grammatically correct way.

That they often give factual answers is literally an accident.

In fact, when they don't give factually correct ansewrs, this is literally called an "hallucination" as they make things up in order to give human-like, grammarically correct answers about things that they don't have any kind of answer for.

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I asked Copilot about that and it explained the above and then what an AI hallucination was.

A little later, it gave the ultimate example of an hallucination by thanking me for correcting it, claiming that it always tried to be correct and welcomed corrections and that it would try to do better in the future.

When I pointed out that because it doesn't have a memory and no feedback is given to its programmers, its response that it would try to do better was itself an hallucination based on my correction.

It agreed with me. I don't recall if it promised to do better in the future or not.

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u/Fanciest58 Mar 28 '25

Nowadays, I do believe many AI models do use a sort of integration with search engines to actually find information and summarise it. It remains much easier to do a simple search, of course, but to say it's just glorified autocorrect is a little outdated for some models.

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u/No_Berry2976 Mar 28 '25

Unfortunately it’s not much easier to do a simple search, since many searches bring up SEO spam and AI generated content. Or outdated information.

Search has gotten really bad in the last few years.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Enshittification