AI Is An Oxymoron As Bot Writer Authors Articles Riddled With Factual Errors
The long-lived tech site has started posting search-optimized "evergreen" articles with basic information about best financial practices and investing. CNET has posted as many as twelve of these in a day, and they have natural-language headlines clearly intended to pull in readers from web searches.
These posts are not written by a human. They're written by an AI, likely one similar to (if not actually) ChatGPT. While CNET claims that the articles are "reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by a human editor with topical expertise," Futurism blog reviewed several articles and found egregious errors in all of them.
One of the articles in question was linked directly from CNET's post explaining that these contentious creations were written by AI. That's right: CNET didn't actually explain that these posts were written by AI, initially, which caused an uproar that forced CNET to address the issue. That prompted the "reviewed" statement above. CNET's response to the uproar was to remove "Staff" in the "CNET Money Staff" byline.
The thing is, in this article, the AI writes things like "if you deposit $10,000 into a savings account that earns 3% interest compounding annually, you'll earn $10,300 at the end of the first year." We probably don't even have to explain what's wrong with this sentence, but to spell it out for you, you will *have* $10,300, not *earn* $10,300. Your earnings will be $300.
This is a very dumb error and an obvious mistake to anyone who understands percentages, but unfortunately these articles, with their simple, natural-language headlines (like "What is Compound Interest?"), are likely to reach those who understand the least. Basic errors like this are a real problem, and this is far from the only example.
The thing about current "artificial intelligence" is that they are essentially black boxes that take in patterned input and then can recreate those patterns. They're machines that recognize patterns and can re-create them in a convincing way. However, they absolutely do not "think"; they have no understanding of these patterns. This is why Stable Diffusion makes hands with 16 fingers, and why ChatGPT says that APR and APY are the same thing.
Until we achieve generalized artificial intelligence that can speak on topics with understanding instead of simply playing "monkey see, monkey do" with data, you'd better leave all of your "what is" and "how do I" questions for another human being.
