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.