The AI got it wrong. Now what? The friend who makes up stories
Everyone has that friend who never says "I don't know". Ask anything and they answer on the spot, with conviction. Half is true, half is made up, and they do not notice the difference.
Text-writing AI assistants work a bit like that. The technical name for it is hallucination.
Myth or fact: "AI knows everything"?
Myth. It learned to assemble sentences that look right. There is no "truth checker" inside it. If you ask for the source of a piece of information, it may invent a book, an author and even the page number.
Where this has already gone wrong
- Lawyers who cited non-existent cases suggested by an AI.
- People who followed medicine doses suggested by a chat.
- Fake news with "quotes" from people who never said those words.
How to protect yourself in 3 steps
- Trust, but check. For health, money and law, verify with an official source.
- Ask for the source and open the link. If the link does not exist, neither does the answer.
- Be suspicious of confidence. AI uses the same tone of certainty whether it is right or wrong.
Keep this
AI is great for starting a search and terrible for finishing one. The last word is yours.
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