Or: The best lies have a nugget of truth in them.
Lucubration – The action or occupation of intensive study originally by candle or lamplight.
Gaslighting – Psychological abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own sanity, memories, or perception.
I was recently having a play with Google Bard. Bard, unlike ChatGPT has access to live data. It also undergoes live feedback and quality control. I was hoping to see if it would find me any journals with articles on prion research which I’d previously overlooked.
Me: Please show me some recent articles about prion research.
(Because always be polite to our AI overlords, they’ll remember!)
Bard: Sure, here are some recent articles about prion research:
New Study Reveals Mechanism for How Disease-Spreading Prions Can Jump from One Species to Another (ScienceDaily, September 12, 2022)
Researchers Develop New Method to Detect Prions (The Scientist, January 27, 2023)
Prion Disease Gene Therapy Shows Promise in Mice (Nature Medicine, February 24, 2023)
Prion Vaccine Shows Promise in Animal Studies (JAMA Neurology, March 24, 2023)
At first glance this all seemed pretty reasonable, then I spotted the “Prion Vaccine Shows Promise in Animal Studies” “article”. What? Wait? How?
We’re not even sure what prions are for and Prion-knockout mice exhibit behavioural abnormalities having a vaccine for prion-related diseases seems.. Unlikely.
All four journals really exist, but on closer examination, only the first article does. Bard had used its Large Language Model magic to just make up a series of titles which sounded plausible. Certainly sounding reasonable for titles you’d expect to find in these journals.
A couple of months after being gaslit by Bard, an unfortunate lawyer had a similar experience with Bard contemporary, ChatGPT. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t check its working and submitted the invented cases to a judge.
As I write this, my colleague has been singing the praises of Claude, which just for variety, I shall now go and try.
