this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these "definitions" (I don't believe that slavery can be "defined" as good, but okay) are what's going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.
It's also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don't have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet's information has concluded that slavery had benefits.
This is what I think too. We've had enough trouble with "vaccines CaUsE AuTiSm" and that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
AI is capable of a real death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect.
That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven't either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn't combat at all
To be fair no one expects The Lancet to publish falsified data. Only it does occasionally and getting it to retract is like trying to turn a container ship around in the Panama Canal.
But yeah this is part of what I mean. Media cycles and digital reproduceability and algorithms that seek clicks can all potentially give AI-generated errors a lot of play and rewrites into more credible forms etc.
Filtering falsified data before publishing it is near impossible. If you want to publish falsified data, you easily can. No one can verify it without replicating the experiment on their own, which is usually done after the publication by a different scientific group. Peer review is more suited to filter out papers with bad methodology.
Good point. The problem is more that it took them over a decade to retract it.