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Stuff like this makes me seriously think we are still centuries away from actual AI
AI will change the world, but it’s just a catalyst that accelerates the chemical reaction of existing idiocy and ignorance in society.
It’s not lying. That would imply understanding, something well beyond the reach of models like this. The problem the article highlights, however, is absolutely real, but hardly something new:

the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry
The problem with this statement is that generating data that is statistically similar to other data is exactly what these things are designed to do! From n-grams to transformers, that’s the whole game.
So it’s indistinguishable from “real” scientists.
Turing test passed?
No. In the Turing Test the questioner got to pick the questions they asked. Including the topics.

in peer review. It’s annoying that political pundits will use them but generally if you poke around for even a little peer review action on studies like that you’ll find it and find when they’re garbage.
The real headache is when you have a legit study that’s being taken out of context. Those are harder to spot.
I believe the fraudulent Egyptian study on treating COVID with Ivermectin [bbc.com] went through peer review.
Peer review is about looking at methods and analysis, it’s not really well equipped to figure out if someone is simply fabricating data.
That’s why this is worrying, because it makes creation of fake datasets easier, meaning more unethical researchers are bound to do it. And the researchers who are going to do this are the ones in less developed countries like Egypt where it’s even harder for outsiders to verif

So some stuff is going to slip through but when other researchers go to use the data they’re going to quickly figure out that the data doesn’t work.
How? The data will work, it just doesn’t represent reality.

Science is about reproducibility. If I write a bad paper it gets peer reviewed and it’s somehow slips through the process but it sits doing nothing for decades on end that’s pretty harmless. If my bad paper gets picked up and used then it’s going to get a lot more attention and the peer review process is going to catch the mistakes made the first time.
The problem is that reproducibility is hard, especially with fields that study people (epidemiology, medical, psychology). Did you fail to reproduce because you did the experiment wrong? Because of another variable you changed? Because the population is different? etc, etc. That’s why people do reviews.

This is basically how we know that study was bogus. It’s one of those cases where ultimately the system works. It’s not like religious dogma where mistakes and distortions can stand for hundreds if not thousands of years
The system working in that case is a bit of a stretch.
We caught the study because the fraud was lazy and had obvious red flags like partially duplica
They really have achieved human-like behavior.
Because they never knew it and if they did then knowing it gets in the way of falsely generated profits.
Generating sample or test data is a powerful use case for AI.
Dump a DDL script into a conversation and have it generate insert statements. Bam!
Generate statistic sets based loosely on equations (for different definitions of loose). Bam!
What is being pointed out is a feature, certainly not a bug…
Oh, I can and have many times done just this with Excel. However Excel is probably more dangerous than AI at this point…
Heh, I was thinking the same exact thing as I read this. There’s actually some real-world demand for accurately-structured filler data for various types of server load testing for planning resource provisioning. It would be great at that!
People were able to design things like this and fake data, reports etc have been around for a long, long time.
They used many tools to generate this information. Under scrutiny the data fails verification, like checking if that person really exists, but people have made fake convincing data for a long, long time. Like all data sets, AI or not, you have to still validate it.
What’s happened here is there is technology that they’re introduced to and they’re shocked ‘Tech can do this?! WOW hey guys! Do you realize what this can do?’
Hence my beer reference.
“Whoa guys, have you tried this thing called beer? I started using it, you know the next day though, there are some serious side affects, watch out’.
The rest of us have an eye brow raised and are like, ‘uh huh…’
I think the expectation is that data generated in this way would be even harder to detect as fake data. This is both plausible and troubling.

I think the expectation is that data generated in this way would be even harder to detect as fake data. This is both plausible and troubling.
Only if you were taking things at face value, which is a common problem the media tries to exploit. Anyone worth their salt that uses data from other studies attempts to verify the data. Competent researchers do not take unverified study data as accurate. My previous position stands. It’s easier for lazy people to be aware of the ability to generate fake data, that’s about it. Making it more accessible to generate doesn’t take away from competent researchers, although might make it more obnoxious to sift th
Ironically or not, this is a major reason science isn’t blind to the ‘who’. Variations on just writing down numbers, or selectively keeping numbers have been around for as long as the scientific method.
Pretty much the only thing it is good at as far as I can see.
Scientists are judged by the number of papers they produce, not the quality
When you require publication in order to remain employed, clever people may seek workarounds if they have nothing real to publish
Okay. “Robot: commit $TYPE fraud for me!” is a rather underwhelming bit of functionality.
At best, it replaces “Grad student/postdoc: commit fraud for me!” as the de facto lexicon of a non-negligible portion of the modern American academic’s lexicon.
Somewhat of an inferior substitute, actually. While faster, the machine, having no sense of morality or even a memory beyond a single user session, will happily execute the fraud, but unlike the grad student, will not internalize the lesson that the fraud *is* th
The title implies that ChatGPT just spat out fake data that supported it’s conclusions. It did not. You have to lead it to where you want to go – it takes agency.
Why can’t backlinks to the source documents be maintained, allowing a user to click on any selection and say “show your work”?
Has there ever been a white person who got rich and old and didn’t grow out of touch and distant from the rest of the world? The founders couldn’t care less. They’re off enjoying their multi billions and doing god knows what. And I can’t even blame them, I’d probably do the same.
amaaaaaaaaaazing, color me impressed. give whoever is in charge of said software this week (I vote clippy) a cookie
More indication that ChatGPT is indistinguishable from human researchers.
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