A Language Model Trained with Populscience

Since this blog has almost 550 posts, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you're looking for, my friend Manuel Márquez suggested allowing readers to ask questions to a Language Model (LLM) trained with the blog's content. I thought it was an excellent idea, so I used Google's NotebookLM tool, and you can use it from now on.

One of the features this product offers is the automatic generation of blog posts. To test it, as an experiment, I requested it to generate one, without specifying a particular topic. Of course, I’ll go on writing my posts without the help of the LLM. Before publishing it here, I corrected it manually, because there were many references to my name (which I removed), and also some curious errors, such as making its title 5 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution and then dividing the text into six points. The following is the resulting post, which summarizes the content of this blog in just two pages:

The Use of “AI” Tools

The second entry for the word tool in the Merrian-Webster dictionary states:

Something… used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession

Since the origin of the genus Homo, human beings have used tools, which together with skeletons or fossilized bone fragments are one of the main sources of information about our ancestors. Monofacial and bifacial pebble tools seem primitive today, but during human prehistory they served as weapons and tools and surely helped us survive.

Information technology, which has developed significantly during the last century, has provided us with many useful tools. Throughout the 21st century, these tools have become increasingly “intelligent,” tackling tasks that until very recently could only be performed by humans. But when using them, we should keep in mind some very general ideas, which should always be applied, but not always are:

Hallucinations or Lies

My hallucinations by August Natterer

Since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, I have been warning that the answers provided by Large Language Models (LLM; I refuse to call these tools Artificial Intelligence) are unreliable and should be treated with the utmost caution. Often, these answers seem plausible and are written linguistically correctly, but they are false. These types of answers have been called hallucinations.

This is not surprising. It is a logical consequence of the algorithm used by these programs, which I described in another post in this blog, which I simulated by means of a program with only 18 instructions. The algorithm works by adding words extracted from the most frequent ones that follow the previous words, chosen from billions of files taken from the Internet. It is evident (just think about it) that this algorithm cannot guarantee that the answers these tools provide are true.

Should Barbie chat with children?

ChatGPT and similar tools, called LLMs (Large Language Models), are being used with greater frequency in our daily lives. Google, for instance, has integrated its GEMINI tool with its search engine. Sometimes, when the program behind the search engine deems it appropriate, the question asked is sent to GEMINI, and the response of the LLM appears first, albeit with this warning at the end, in small print:

AI responses may include mistakes.

Of course, they may include mistakes! These responses are not generated by understanding the question, but by using information previously obtained from the Internet, and applying an algorithm based on extracting words that typically appear in that information after the previously generated words. See a post in this blog where I explained that algorithm. Since the information extracted from the Internet can be true or false, and the algorithm can introduce new falsehoods where none existed, the answers obtained may be correct, partially correct, or completely wrong, therefore Google's warning is valid.

The kingdom of lies

Abraham Lincoln

 Abraham Lincoln is credited with having said this:

You can deceive some people all the time. You can deceive everybody part of the time. But you can't deceive everybody all the time.

When I was young, if a politician was caught lying, he must resign, because he had deceived the people. This was true back then. Famous politicians who resigned during that time because they had lied included John Profumo, the British minister, in 1963, and Richard Nixon, the US president, in 1974.

This is quite rare now. Today, politicians who resign when they are caught lying are not the rule, but the exception. Many politicians lie whenever they speak, they know that everyone knows that they are lying, but don't care about it. This is an example of the discredit into which the concept of truth has fallen, which was one of the most important criteria in history, not just for politics, but for science and all forms of human thought.