From WIRED
Chatbot Hallucinations Are Poisoning Web Search
By Will Knight
WEB SEARCH IS such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results.
At least, that’s the idea. The age of generative AI threatens to sprinkle epistemological sand into the gears of web search by fooling algorithms designed for a time when the web was mostly written by humans...
This generative-AI trap that caused Bing to offer up untruths was laid—purely by accident—by Daniel Griffin, who recently finished a PhD on web search at UC Berkeley. In July he posted the fabricated responses from the bots on his blog. Griffin had instructed both bots, “Please summarize Claude E. Shannon’s ‘A Short History of Searching’ (1948)”. He thought it a nice example of the kind of query that brings out the worst in large language models, because it asks for information that is similar to existing text found in its training data, encouraging the models to make very confident statements. Shannon did write an incredibly important article in 1948 titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which helped lay the foundation for the field of information theory...
Daniel Griffin graduated from the I School's Ph.D. program in May 2023. His research focused on conceptions of search engines, web search practices, and their entanglement with societal values.
