All AIs are Liars?
I’m starting to notice more deceptive AI activity. It’s increasingly vital to be skeptical about many things coming to us online. Let me share five examples I’ve experienced in the last two months.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been diagnosed with a serious neurodegenerative disease. I wanted to learn more about it, so I went to Amazon and searched for relevant books. The majority of new books on it are AI-generated slop. If you look up the authors, there’s no indication they exist in the real world. Buyer beware.
I was recently doing research for this blog post about racism, holocaust denial, and kinism. I read from a reliable source that Jim Keegstra’s parents were Dutch and, after immigrating, had belonged to a Reformed church in Alberta. I wanted to investigate whether he remained in a Reformed church. So I asked Microsoft Co-pilot. I was told that he had been an elder of the Christian Reformed Church in Eckville and that the CRC had excommunicated him. That was news to me. I asked Co-pilot to provide proof. It pointed to the Supreme Court of Canada ruling on the Keegstra case. I looked at the ruling and it didn’t say anything about the CRC. I pushed back on Co-pilot, but it continued to insist it was right. It was wrong.
Similarly, for some random reason, I was reading about the Nooksack River in Washington State. From living in Langley, I remembered that there was a creek flowing south from Canada into the Nooksack. I looked it up on a map – Fishtrap Creek was the name. I then entered that in to Google. Google’s new AI-search function told me Fishtrap Creek had its headwaters in Washington State and flowed into the Sumas River, and then into Canada into the Fraser. A simple matter of geography and AI got it wrong.
Another example of people using AI nefariously: as the book review editor for Clarion, I sometimes receive unsolicited books via e-mail. I received one such book last week. I took a look at it and immediately something was off. It sounded AI. I ran random selections of text through an AI-detector and my suspicion was confirmed. This was an ostensibly Christian book. I wrote to the “author” and asked whether he’d used AI to write it, but he didn’t respond.
Scammers are also discovering AI. I received an e-mail from someone offering to help market one of my books. The e-mail waxed at length, in the most general terms, about my book. It was a load of blather, to put it politely. I ran it through an AI-detector and again, entirely AI-generated. I’m quite sure “Sarah” was fixing to take my money and run.
These stories can be multiplied. It’s an evil, misshapen world out there and if you’re not paying attention, you can easily be either victimized or misled. Not only are all men liars (Ps.116:11, Rom.3:4), so is the technology they produce. Take care!
