News coverage from April 2023 about the Center for an Informed Public and CIP-affiliated research and researchers.
- Undark (April 6): “ChatGPT isn’t ‘hallucinating.’ It’s bullshitting.”
CIP faculty member and UW Biology professor Carl Bergstrom co-authored an Undark opinion article with Yale University computational biologist C. Brandon Ogbunu where they argue that the analogy that AI chatbots can “hallucinate” wrong answers “is a misleading one. That’s because hallucination implies perception: It is a false sense impression that can lead to false beliefs about the world. In a state of altered consciousness, for example, a person might hear voices when no one is present, and come to believe that they are receiving messages from a higher power, an alien intelligence, or a nefarious government agency. A large language model, however, does not experience sense impressions, nor does it have beliefs in the conventional sense.”
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- CNN Business (April 6): “‘It’s an especially bad time’: Tech layoffs are hitting ethics and safety teams”
CIP co-founder Jevin West, a UW Information School associate professor, was interviewed by CNN Business about the risks of tech companies gutting teams focused on election safety, misinformation, online extremism and ethical applications of artificial intelligence. Companies are, West said, “in a super, super tight race to the top for AI and I think they probably don’t want teams slowing them down.” But “it’s an especially bad time to be getting rid of these teams when we’re on the cusp of some pretty transformative, kind of scary technologies.”
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- Nature (April 6): “Searching the web for science: how small mistakes create big problems”
CIP co-founder and UW Information School associate professor Jevin West was interviewed for a Nature article about how small errors and mistakes can end up in search tools and credible websites can easily spread in many directions leading to rapid propagation of misinformation, which can be lethal to trustability of research.
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- Chronicle for Higher Education (April 6): “Will ChatGPT change how professors assess learning?”
CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield was interviewed for an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education for an article about the potential impacts of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools on student learning. The Chronicle writes: “Writing can be a path for thinking, Caulfield says, and if ChatGPT weakens that connection for students, it will be a loss. But when it comes to assessment, the relationship between good writing and good thinking is not clear cut. There are students whose fluid prose obscures an undercooked thesis. And there are students who have good insights but struggle to convey them on the page in the desired style. Perhaps, he thinks, ChatGPT could help surface hidden talent.”
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- NBC News (April 10): “Conspiracy theorists made Tiffany Dover into an anti-vaccine icon. She’s finally ready to talk about it.”
CIP postdoctoral scholar Rachel Moran-Prestridge was interviewed by NBC News for an article about a Tennessee nurse who became the subject of vaccine conspiracy theories and how communications playbooks for dealing with conspiracy theories are not well suited for information conditions, “The hospital is operating under old assumptions that their role is to control the narrative, when really, they’re not in control of these narratives at all.”
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- The Boston Globe (April 12): “The Marathon bombing’s 12-hour suspect”
“The Boston Marathon bombing just really drives home where that very natural human process of trying to figure things out can go awry,” CIP director and UW HCDE associate professor Kate Starbird, whose research on misinformation grew in part from the Marathon bombing, told The Boston Globe in an interview 10 years after the Boston Marathon bombing.
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- The New York Times (April 18): “What was Twitter, anyway?”
In a New York Times Magazine feature, CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield pointed to #RIPScottBaio incident from 2011, which gained viral traction on Twitter, showed how a small conspiracy “could capture the platform’s homuncular version of reality and tickle it until it shouted nonsense.”
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- Open Mind Magazine (April 28): “Weaponized empathy”
“We are better-informed consumers when we are aware that our empathetic strings are being pulled all the time. If you read an emotional headline, check into your emotions,” CIP co-founder and UW Information School associate professor Jevin West told Open Mind magazine in an interview for a story about weaponized empathy.
