People will gladly tell you there’s so much content online and it’s so great that you don’t need college anymore (somewhat true). The internet has more facts, more knowledge, updated more often, than any written source in time. It’s just being lost in a sea of junk. Google won’t be able to keep up at indexing all the meaningless content. They won’t be able to provide meaningful search and filtering against an infinite sea of half truths and trash. And then they’ll realize they shouldn’t try, and the index will become a lot more selective.
Today, no one should trust online information. You should only trust information that genuinely would have editors and proof teams and publishers. I think this will finally swing the pendulum back to the value of publishers and gatekeepers of information.
I think we're already here. I asked Google Bard about the rubber ducks, then about empty plastic bottles. Bard apparently has a "fact check" mode that uses Google search.
It rated "The empty water bottle is made of plastic, which has a density lower than water" as accurate, using a Quora response which stated the same thing as a citation. We already have unknowlagable people writing on the internet; if anything these I hope these new AI things and the increased amount of bullshit will teach people to be more skeptical.
(and for what it's worth, ChatGPT 4 accurately answers the same question)
The fact that it squeaks when squeezed, as well as common knowledge about bath ducks, tells you it's hollow, therefore the density of the material it is made of would be the wrong way to determine it it would float. It's the average density of the entire duck that matters (i.e. weight of duck vs weight of water displaced by duck's volume).
"Rubber ducks float because they are made of a material less dense than water" both is wrong but sounds reasonable. Call it a "bad grade school teacher" kind of mistake.
Pre-gpt, however, it's not the kind of mistake that would make it to print: people writing about rubber ducks were probably rubber duck experts (or had high school level science knowledge).
Print Is cite-able. Print perpetuates and reinforces itself. Some day someone will write a grade school textbook built with GPTs, that will have this incorrect knowledge, and so on.
But what will become of us when most gateways to knowledge are riddled with bullshit like this?