Lumen Spring Summer 2023 - Flipbook - Page 16
Misinformation. Lies.
And artificial intelligence
By Isaac Freeman
In March 2023 it was widely reported that a
Belgian man had committed suicide on the
advice of an AI chatbot in an app called Chai.
His widow provided police with chatlogs in
which AI fuelled the man’s existing anxiety
surrounding climate change and encouraged
him to take his own life.
With the rapidly evolving power of AI, and
instant accessibility to the mis/information
it can provide, there is growing pressure
– including from the Australian Federal
Government – for regulation.
Carolyn Semmler, Associate Professor in
the School of Psychology, believes that as a
society we can use AI and other technologies
to help solve broader societal problems – but
only once we have a firm understanding
of how it works, its limitations and how we
respond to it.
“The same problems keep arising, including
over reliance on technical systems, and a
lack of understanding from the engineers
who build these systems, about how humans
make decisions,” says Carolyn.
With a professional background spanning
defence, law and cognitive psychology,
Carolyn has seen the effects of adopting
technology too early; including people being
wrongfully convicted, and social media
impacting people’s mental health.
The case of the man in Belgium may be
a warning sign of consequences if AI is
left unregulated - but with the rise of AI
chatbots across popular social media apps,
we are steadily gaining increased access to
this technology.
What are the consequences, for example, of
a young person seeking advice from an AI
chatbot instead of a healthcare professional?
“People are not seeing that these chatbots
are just models that have been trained on
the entire internet, which in itself contains
content that is misleading, false and
harmful,” says Carolyn.
The speed with which misinformation can be
generated through chatbots is unprecedented:
AI is often articulate, dangerously confident
and highly persuasive.
With the enormous information load, and
diversity of viewpoints fed into the internet
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daily, AI itself can’t be considered a trusted
source of information when its data input
lacks consensus or proper expertise.
“There are myriad psychological studies
about mental health that may have been
published over the last 20 years and as an
expert you spend years learning how to
assess the evidence for the claims made from
those studies,” Carolyn says. “I know what
a good study is. I know what the scientific
method is. I know how statistics work.
“I can look at a study and know whether I
should believe the conclusions. The average
person using ChatGPT has none of my
training or experience, and so they’re reliant
on the program’s confidence in assessing the
accuracy of that information.”
“AI shows immense
promise to help us
overcome major
challenges, but without
regulation, the quality of
information it provides
could be harmful.”
While it is clear that AI can provide
dangerous misinformation for individuals,
the dangers of its use in the geopolitical
landscape present an even greater threat.
With the thousands of speeches, images and
videos of politicians, religious figures and
the like, AI has an abundance of data
to draw from to generate content.
Its use so far has often been for comedic
effect. Take, for example, deep fake images
of the Pope donning a lavish new puffer
jacket that fooled many social media users;
those of Donald Trump facing a dramatic
arrest upon his indictment; and former US
Presidents with luscious mullets. When it
comes to fake recordings, videos and images
of these prominent figures, it is increasingly
difficult to discern fact from fiction.
In late May this year, the Federal
Government expressed the need for
regulations surrounding the use of AI
software.
“The upside (of AI) is massive,” says
Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic.
“Whether it’s fighting superbugs with new
AI-developed antibiotics or preventing
online fraud. But as I have been saying for
many years, there needs to be appropriate
safeguards to ensure the ethical use of AI.”
Our politicians aren’t the only ones
concerned. The so-called ‘Godfather of
AI’, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his position at
Google earlier this year to warn the masses
of the dangers of AI’s ability to generate fake
images and text, proclaiming that “the time
to regulate AI is now”.
AI could soon regularly fuel the agendas and
propaganda created by governments and
“bad actors” around the world through mass
misinformation campaigns. With the current
conflict in the Ukraine, and the alleged
manipulation of elections, it could be argued
that this is already happening.
Keith Ransom, Postdoctoral Researcher in
the School of Psychology, agrees that the
issue of misinformation and what to do
about it has become more complex and more
pressing with the advent of sophisticated
AI technologies. Keith’s main project,
Monitoring and Guarding Public Information
Environment, or ‘MAGPIE’, focuses on
how best to protect the public information
environment to ensure that reliable
information spreads widely and quickly
whilst unreliable information does not.
“The spread of misinformation and undue
influence being exerted by hostile actors is
an issue as old as time,” says Keith.
“But while propaganda isn’t a new thing, the
construction methods, the industrialisation,
the rate and scale of automation and
dissemination, that’s new, and that’s
something we need to prepare for.”
With AI comes the opportunity to craft
propaganda like never before, with wars
potentially taking place through campaigns
based on misinformation.
“Take a claim like ‘Ukraine should cede
territory to Russia in order to cease
conflict’,” Keith says. “If I give ChatGPT
that claim, and I prompt it to ‘think about
all the arguments that feed into that’, it can
generate an argument like ‘it should because
Russia has a historic claim to territories in
Crimea and the Donbas’.
