Photo: Petar Milošević via Wikimedia.
I had a chat about artificial intelligence recently with author Francesca Forrest. She is really serious about avoiding AI wherever she encounters it. I tend to like it OK when it suits me: for example, when doing a search for information.
But I can sense there is something deeply insidious about it, even apart from the way it guzzles all our water resources.
There is one supposedly “helpful” feature that irritates me a lot. Autocomplete. It not only makes horrendous mistakes with slang, people’s names, and foreign words, but it suggests apparently harmless words that I simply was not intending to write. If I want to say that a relative had to go to rehab, you might think it’s fine to say “he went to rehabilitation.” But that’s not what I was going to say. It’s not the way I talk. And what else will I end up writing if I feel lazy some day?
So I turned off Autocomplete.
At Scientific American, I find that Claire Cameron agrees that autocomplete is annoying. And she describes new research suggesting it is even more insidious than it appears.
“Autocomplete suggestions,” she writes, “are perhaps one of the most annoying ‘useful’ tools for writing: increasingly integrated into anything online that requires you to input text, autocomplete harnesses artificial intelligence to suggest what to write in e-mails, surveys, and more.
“The tools are meant to save time (though many find that assessing and rewriting the suggested text takes longer than writing it from scratch). But these AI tools can also change how you express yourself. An AI writing assistant could make your writing sound more polite, for example — or boring. And now a new study led by researchers at Cornell University suggests AI autocomplete can even change the way you think.
” ‘Autocomplete is everywhere now,’ said Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell, in a statement. The research builds on work, published in 2023 by Naaman and his colleagues, that suggested short autocomplete suggestions could sway opinions. Since then the use of such tools has exploded. ‘It has become clear that bias explicitly built into AI interactions is a very plausible scenario,’ he said.
“The researchers asked participants to fill in an online survey with questions about hot-button social and political issues. Some were prompted with an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased toward one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.
“Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position — including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.
“Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study. Warning the participants that they might be exposed to misinformation by the AI didn’t temper the persuasive effect either.
“ ‘We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,’ Naaman said. ‘Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.’ ”
See Scientific American, here.
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