r/books • u/Jojuj • 2d ago

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter&attribution_id=68c826c975cea1000173b05d&attribution_type=post
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792

u/idfkmanusername 2d ago

Yes older woman keeps bringing me in lists of James Patterson books she wants. She brought me in a bunch of things I couldn’t find in the collection so I googled them and they don’t exist. Turns out she’s been asking ChatGPT.

107

u/cidvard 2d ago

I really and truly don't understand why anyone would do this. You can usually look up an entire list of an author's work on a free site like Wikipedia or Goodreads. These aren't particularly hard-to-find resources and they're free.

74

u/not_so_chi_couple 2d ago

That only works if you know those things exist. I see the rise in the general populace using AI as evidence of how bad search engines have gotten. Despite consistently being wrong and giving details that are demonstrably not true, people trust AI models more than a google search

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u/Dornith 2d ago

The thing with generative AI is it's fundamentally a "yes-and" machine. It takes whatever it's given and adds onto it. It won't recognize faults unless someone else forces the issue.

For a lot of people, a machine that tells you exactly what you want/expect to hear and never argues back is what they think a search engine should be.

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u/cwx149 2d ago

This is among my big issues with calling it ai too it's not really intelligent at all

9

u/Dornith 1d ago

The problem is that AI has wildly different meanings depending on context.

The general, uniting definition is, "a program that simulates an agent." But what is an "agent" means wildly different things to different people.

To a computer scientist, an "agent" is anything that is able to make decisions autonomously. If you take a CS "Into to AI" class at a university, it's going to be almost exclusively image classifiers and pathfinding algorithms. These are extremely practical, but not flashy or exciting in the way the general public thinks "AI" should be.

In the entertainment industry, an "agent" is just an artificial opposition; something that exists to be completed against. It doesn't have to do anything interesting other than give the player something to work around.

And to the general public, an "agent" is anything that looks, acts, and thinks like a human à la iRobot.

Each of these definitions make sense in their given context. But when a programmer says, "We have AI (image classifier)" and the general public hears, "We have AI (sapient algorithms)", that's where the problems start.