There are a lot of people going to libraries to look for books that don’t exist: an AI invented them

Junk content made with AI is sneaking into every corner of the internet: it is ruining the authenticity of Etsythe Wikipediait confuses us search for an apartment in Idealista and of course plague social networks. He ‘slop’ of AI is reaching the real world, specifically libraries.

What is happening. They tell it inScientific American. There are people going to libraries and archives in search of books or scientific articles that do not appear anywhere for one reason: they do not exist. International Red Cross has alerted to the situation and blames AI tools such as Gemini, ChatGPT or Copilot. They assure that “These systems do not conduct research, verify sources or collate information. They generate new content based on statistical patterns and, therefore, may produce invented results.”

Fed up librarians. The research director of the Virginia library estimates that at least 15% of the queries they receive through mail are about documents and works generated by ChatGPT and similar tools. “For our staff, it is much more difficult to prove that there is no single record,” he says. A Bluesky user recounts a similar experience when a student asked him to find a series of references. After searching for a while without success, he asked the student where he got the list from and he confessed that it came from Google’s AI summaries.

Made-up dating isn’t something that started happening the day before yesterday,In 2023 there were already discussions about it. Seattle University found that it is often very difficult to verify these invented quotes. The reason is that AI usually gives titles of magazines or books that exist, but what does not exist is the chapter or issue where the information is found. What it does is mix information to make it seem convincing, when in reality it is a dead end.

AI and books. Invented references are not the only problem, there are librarians who also They criticize books created entirely with AI for being “incredibly bad” and we have recently learned of the case of South Korea and the resounding failure of its AI school book program.

On the other hand we have the copyright problem. As with works of art, books too have been used to train AI without compensating their authors. A group of authors sued Anthropicfor this reason, but The judge ruled in favor of the company.

Papers on AI, made with AI. In an article by Futurism They said that a consequence of the AI ​​slop is that the papers that investigate AI themselves are made with AI. It is estimated that the number of papers on AI has doubled in recent years and journals such as NeurIPS have had to ask doctoral students to help them review them. There is a specific case of a researcher named Kevin Zhu who has participated in more than 100 papers in one year, an exorbitant figure for experts. To no one’s surprise, many of these papers are a real disaster full of made up quotes, blatant errors and sometimes hidden text to manipulate the review systems themselves.

hallucinations. That AI invents things is quite common, they are the In AI jargon it is known as hallucinations and one of the weak points of language models; The advances are enormous, but the reality is that We still can’t trust AI and it is necessary to verify the information. Hallucinations are often the reason why those who use AI in their jobs are caught, such as the consulting firm Deloitte, which delivered a report to the Australian government that contained references to completely fabricated reports.

Image | Cottonbro studio, Pexels

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There are a lot of people going to libraries to look for books that don’t exist: an AI invented them

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Xataka

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Amparo Babiloni

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