Mystery AI Hype Theater is now available in podcast form!. @alexhanna and I started this project as a one-off, trying out a new way of responding to and deflating AI hype. and then surprised ourselves by turning it into a series.

RT @alexhanna: AI and Fascism go hand-in-hand. New newsletter post.

Sunday's thread on why chatbots & LLMs are a bad solution for information access, with replies to the most common types of counterarguments I encountered in my mentions.

Sunday's thread as a newsletter post, with replies to the most common types of counterarguments I encountered in my mentions.

RT @emilymbender: The chatbot interface invites you to just sit back and take the appealing-looking AI slop as if it were "information". Do….

RT @emilymbender: As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots a….

The chatbot interface invites you to just sit back and take the appealing-looking AI slop as if it were "information". Don't be that guy. /fin.

But now more than ever we all need to level-up our information access practices and hold high expectations regarding provenance --- i.e. citing of sources. >>.

Finally, the chatbots-as-search paradigm encourages us to just accept answers as given, especially when they are stated in terms that are both friendly and authoritative. >>.

The case of the discussion forum has a further twist: Any given piece of information there is probably one you'd want to verify from other sources, but the opportunity to connect with people going through similar medical journeys is priceless. >>.

If instead you get an answer from a chatbot, even if it is correct, you lose the opportunity for that growth in information literacy. >>.

If you have the underlying links, you have the opportunity to evaluate the reliability and relevance of the information for your current query --- and also to build up your understanding of those sources over time. >>.

Imagine putting a medical query into a standard search engine and receiving a list of links including one to a local university medical center, one to WebMD, one to Dr. Oz, and one to an active forum for people with similar medical issues. >>.

That sense-making includes refining the question, understanding how different sources speak to the question, and locating each source within the information landscape. >>.

Setting things up so that you get "the answer" to your question cuts off the user's ability to do the sense-making that is critical to information literacy. >>.

But even if the chatbots on offer were built around something other than LLMs, something that could reliably get the right answer, they'd still be a terrible technology for information access. >>.

Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%. >>.

If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. >>.

Why are LLMs bad for search? Because LLMs are nothing more than statistical models of the distribution of word forms in text, set up to output plausible-sounding sequences of words. >>.

@chirag_shah and I wrote about this in two academic papers:.2022: 2024: We also have an op-ed from Dec 2022:. >>.

As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access. A thread, with links:. >>.