Is Ai a useful tool?

[llizzie]

Now we’re in the middle of the next wave of tech: the AI explosion. While there’s not a verb equivalent to “Googling” in the common lexicon yet, it leads us to wonder: Should we be crediting AI when we use it?

The short answer is yes — you should credit AI if you use it, just as you’d credit a book, article, website, or any other source.

If it’s a casual usage, you might just say, “I asked ChatGPT for recommendations,” or “I used AI to research this,” and that would be enough.

If you’re doing professional or academic writing however, we can turn to style guides (AP, APA, or MLA, for example) for guidance.

In opinion - it will:

1. take away human jobs
2. be bad for the environment
3. indoctrinate people

So shouldn't you have credited the AI that wrote your post for you, OP?

I read an article today online where the writer had his piece ‘stolen ‘ by AI apparently. It’s a mystery to me how that can happen , but sounds as if it’ll happen more and more.

^ Really? It was online. The whole point of first remote hosting, the internet of things, cookies and the whole privacy invasion machine was that computers could talk to each other without users knowing anything about it or being involved in the process. AI means the computers can do that without anyone even setting them off. The government is fully complicit with computers being allowed to harvest the work of the wage-slave plebs. That began with Google Books years ago and is now continuing in the U.K. with its drive to abandon the principles and meaning of copyright law for all creative material to allow the U.K. to become a ‘world leader’ in AI. Thought - Perhaps the U.K. is becoming a world leader in this because the rest of the world clings to the outdated ideas of democracy, equality and justice and allowing ordinary working people to earn a living, and therefore is too intelligent to want it?

I don't entirely agree. It is information online.

Ai searches for answers on many different sites.

When we use information provided by Ai, should we add an acknowledgement of where we got the information from?

The thread title didn't come from Ai

I have acknowledged my info came from Ai, but each time I have used Ai as an answer on mumsnet, I have received very nasty comments.

Now I find myself copying and pasting, then copying the information myself and deleting the copy and paste. To think I have to go through all that because posters are afraid of Ai.

The information you get from Ai when you want details of a disease is from the NHS or American health sites. What's the difference?

Ai acknowledges where it gets the information from. If you quote from a newspaper, you should say where the info came from.

Why is everyone of the opinion that Ai is something dodgy?

I used to google when I wanted information on anything. I used Wiki. and Gov.com, reddit, - so many different sites. Now I just use whatever comes up when I want information.

I like wines. I buy them at auction. When I see a promising old vintage, I can ask a question about it, is it still drinkable and so on, and I get the information right away. Before, I searched through sites of wine information, what the vintages were in that year, who was the best cellar etc.

Now all the info is there, without doing all that.

But do you think when you use information from Ai that it should be acknowledged as coming from an Ai source? Credit where credit is due, sort of thing, instead of just a link.

I have posted on Ai, credited it to Ai and been condemned for it. Why? It is the same knowledge wherever it comes from.

Why an I castigated for using Ai when someone wants the information I have found?

Facts are facts, wherever they come from. Personal experience and advice is different, which is presumably what mumsnet is all about. Be wary of giving advice on mumsnet, unless it comes from a credited source like Ai.

I think over time, people will grow less afraid of Ai in general, and more aware of the seedier side of fake news, doctored photos..

Quite possibly it will happen more and more. That writer can complain if he has the copyright, at the moment, but the trouble with Ai is that it blows copyright out of the window.

Use Ai search which tells you the source of the information.

ChatGPT and others make up things and make up sources, they’re LLM not truth telling bots so you’d be wise to always double check this stuff.

You didn't write your OP, though. AI generated text isn't yet so good that a reader can't tell. I'm guessing your title is the question you input, then you've just copied the response. You should have said so, given you say you want a conversation about openly using AI.

It's a fucking waste of time, anyway. We can ask an AI to answer the OP from different points of view, have a whole thread written by robots. What would you hope to gain from that?

As I said, use an Ai search engine which acknowledges where the info comes from.

If you quote it, the list of credits might eventually read like a film credit?

And those are still often wrong as they don’t know whether the website they’re quoting from is legitimate or not.

hence why there’s loads of gig economy workers doing scut work looking through stuff being like yes that’s legit no that isn’t, because they are often wrong.

You have to actually check the sources it offers, though. I feed back a factual error to Google AI at least once a week. Yesterday it completely failed on a geography/history question: it kept telling me I meant somewhere else, which is thousands of miles from the location of the historical event.

What you have to remember is that it doesn't 'think'. I found the right place in a couple of minutes by reading forum discussions about the event. The AI wouldn't have found these, because they were not signposted as 'facts' - the misleading information, repeated all over the internet, was.

Last week it answered my question about an English king with a result that would've meant he lived for 400+ years 😂 It had failed to differentiate between all the different Edwards. You wouldn't have known this if you looked at its citations, which all referred to a King Edward without a number. They had dates ... but AI doesn't think.

Facts are facts, wherever they come from.

Oh the innocence.
Never heard of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and plain political leanings op?

”Who guards the guards?” With computers and AI there are no guards. Have you not heard of the controversies over AI ‘therapists’ and chatbots telling youngsters to kill themselves? How will people know what is true in an age of computer control?

I wouldn’t credit an article or website in casual usage though. I wouldn’t say “I used google to research this” so wouldn’t say “I used AI to research this”.

Why would you insult me by calling me a liar?

You cannot accuse without evidence. I don't like your foul language. It is not necessary.

I posted, because it seems to me that posters on this thread really don't know what Ai really is. I am tired of being insulted because I use a search engine to find out the answers to so many questions posters on here ask, when they can find the answers themselves.

Sometimes in the case of human relationships and emotions, which is why so many post on this site, but even they can be helped with information from the internet. Why, suddenly, have people stopped looking for information online? From the sale of books and encyclopedias, it seems there are not so many readers nowadays.

Where do people get their information from then?

When you go into a site - and site - and you get the right hand side of the screen wanting to 'chat' what do you do? There isn't a person there. The Ai contains all the information the site thinks you want to know, but there are some which say a human being is available.

You can still go to the various sites to get information. Quite honestly, I am surprised that posters ask the sort of questions they can find the answer to on google, or any search engine, which has been available for the past 20 years.

Why now has googling become so unpopular on mumsnet? Is it all ignorance?

So presumably you get all your facts from books and encyclopedias, since you do not trust online search engines?

That's fine, but do you also say where Ai got the information from?

More and more Ai is saying where the information comes from, such as NHS if medical.

Do you check it with the NHS site to see if it is correct?

That's OK. Don't use it. The question is if you do use it, do you give credit to Ai, and do you also give credit to the credit Ai gives?

If you have a question about a monarch, Wikipedia is the place, though you have to remember that site too is the sum total of what people feed into it.

So many AI written posts on MN now. It’s really turning into a cesspit.