Disinformation now has a new channel — AI chatbots

By seeding the internet through a process of 'LLM grooming', governments could skew the responses of chatbots with their views delivered in subtler ways.

- Jonathan Eyal

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies rapidly evolve, the general assumption of most regular users is that the AI chatbots and their programs that explore the web, indexing and collecting data as they go along, are differentiated only by their efficiency: some are better than others at answering queries, and some "hallucinate" less than others.

Yet it is now becoming clear that AI bots are not only vulnerable to the inherent biases of those who wrote the programs; they are also susceptible to political biases and manipulation by governments. So, what we get when we search online now is less an impartial summary of available information and more a skillfully curated narrative that may well skew reality, either intentionally or unintentionally.

What is certain, however, is that the internet as we know it is about to undergo a radical transformation. And the battle for impartial information and verifiable facts has never been more urgent, or more desperate.

INHERITING THE SINS OF FATHERS

In theory, artificial intelligence is neutral. It is built on the probabilistic and continuous analysis of vast datasets and functions, and it draws conclusions from large quantities of text and statistical data. Since ChatGPT was deployed in November 2022 as the first widely and commercially available AI chatbot, we have been told persistently by its programmers and by those who championed alternative chatbots that their outputs are value- and bias-free.

It is by now evident that this claim of intellectual neutrality is simply untrue, for at least two straightforward reasons. The chatbots were constructed by people who have their own ideas of what neutrality is; in this context, the "sins" of fathers are certainly inherited by their "children".