Dani cRabaiotti 🦀: So I want to talk about this from the perspective of someone who does professional fact checking as part of my work. For some years now I have been paid to check TV and written content themed around animals to make sure it is factually accurate. Chat GPT & AI has made that job so much harder.

So I want to talk about this from the perspective of someone who does professional fact checking as part of my work. For some years now I have been paid to check TV and written content themed around animals to make sure it is factually accurate. Chat GPT & AI has made that job so much harder.

Uhhhh… this is probably bad 😬😬

But it isn't just about AI - it's about the enshittification of Google. Because now, when the script writers chuck 'how much does an elephant weigh' or whatever into Google it comes up with garbage AI answers. Sp even not using chat GPT you get chat GPT answers.

Chat GPT has so, so, so, so many misconceptions about animals. Think of any animal myth in the book and I guarantee you chat GPT will regurgitate it if prompted to give you facts about that animal.

The sources it has ingested are mostly a) zoo websites (often full of incorrect info) and b) reddit- one of the main starting points for viral animal misinfo

It thinks possums eat 70 bazillion ticks a year, it thinks mantis shrimp can see hundreds of colours, it thinks sharks don't get cancer etc etc So it went from writers being able to use Google and get the odd bad fact...to the top 10+ results just being a proliferation of these myths.

And these things will stick. Not every company out there has the resources or integrity to have a professional zoologist fact check their content. So it will make its way into your kids educational books, into their tv shows, into podcasts.

If we aren't careful with what educational resources we let our kids access we will basically be teaching them a stream of misinformation. So I guess the moral is please do check that materials have a consultant fact checking the subject matter or fact check it yourself before believing the content

I work for a major center of knowledge and expertise and have been asked to fact check things from other departments. FALSE STUFF SNEAKS IN. Lots of things that were culturally absorbed are just nonsense, and now we are burning down trees to inject nonsense into everything.

You are probably aware of this, but I tried it and it did indeed make the BS AI summaries and links disappear. Doesn’t mean your clients/scriptwriters won’t keep stumbling with it. www.theverge.com/24162621/goo...

You can get rid of AI Overviews in Google Searchwww.theverge.com Getting around AI.

Thanks, this is super helpful - I'll recommend it to the people I work with!

*shakes feast at the oatmeal*

Fist* Allah dammit

Zoo websites being full of incorrect information seems like a pretty big problem in its own right. Zoos should be a decent authority on animal science, no?!

Agreed! I used to work at an organisation that also ran a zoo and it's so frustrating 😮‍💨

I'm sure some zoos are better than others. Many zoos are just tourist traps after all. Think about Tiger King. If the zoo isn't one of the big ones known internationally, treat it skeptically. Like when you see a news article posted by like... blazenews.net that just sounds made up.

Also they don't have a lot of resources to purmt into writing website content in many cases

Ask it “in which animals do men have more teeth than women” and see if it gives you Aristotle.

we can go back to books in libraries

So it's basically operating at the level of the creator of a C13th bestiary making shit up about animals it's vaguely heard of.

I can only imagine what it thinks about leopard diets at this point.

Obviously doesn’t solve the problem of other people’s searches, but I’m thinking of trying Kagi. Got any experience of this? kagi.com

Kagi Search - A Premium Search Enginekagi.com Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.

No I've also been tempted myself!

New book idea: your animal facts are trash

Let's do this

I had a book like that as a child, and I absolutely loved it. Please do a new one!

…can I help? I’m a paleontologist

I’m sold please do it

By ChatGPT?

I was just talking to someone about this that was trying to say "why can't kids these days just look things up instead of asking simple questions", I was like "these days you CAN'T just look stuff up on Google you're actually BETTER off asking random redditors"

Really hoping the Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't investing in the hallucinatory engines.

This is such an unsurprising but depressing thread. So many people don’t seem to have noticed it either.

Grumble grumble grumble I might have to go into education so I can teach the kids how to think critically.

I am in education and I have so much material I need to cover that I don’t have time to teach critical thinking. Plus I have no idea how to do that. All I can do is point them to reliable resources and hope.

I feel that! There’s so much to learn and so little time! I’m starting to explore curriculum development cause I’m pretty sure a lack of critical thinking is behind *gestures at all of the problems* Honestly, I’d rather have everyone take a basic philosophy class than even a basic biology class.

What sorts of students do you teach?

Community College, mostly students going into medical careers and non-majors biology. If you go into curriculum development I have ideas of things I’d like to see changed. Like less cell biology for non-majors! Do they really benefit from learning glycolysis? I don’t think so.

That’s already on my list! I’ve been doing evo bio for like a decade and I’m still mad I had to learn the Krebs cycle. I appreciate it now cause the different ways organisms produce ATP really explain how eukaryotes were able to take off and diversify, but that shouldn’t be in anyone’s intro.

None of that detail stuff is memorable! Memorizing it without an appreciation of how it fits into a larger story about evolution, physiology, ecology or something, is a waste of time. Non-major microbio should be learning how cells make tissues and looking at cheek cells under a microscope.

In the immortal words of Mr. Weasley, "Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain." We can teach people to find verifiable sources. It's way harder to get them to go to all that trouble when any old (or new) "fact" will complete the assignment.

Yikes

Gotta love those AI "hallucinations", and idiocracy wasn't supposed to be a documentary.

"Idiocracy is not a documentary" has aged very poorly, right?

This is super alarming

In my mail today 👀‘ Introducing Apple Intelligence The next big step for Apple is here. Apple Intelligence is personal intelligence built into your iPhone, iPad and Mac to help you write, express yourself and get things done effortlessly.1 All while setting a brand‑new standard for privacy in AI.

aaaaaaauugh

I didn’t really understand. I hope one can opt out, but like the transition from flared trousers to drainpipes it might just start to seem normal, this surrender to the machine in its latest incarnation

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