AI and the problem of misinformation  

How likely is it that an AI system will be trained on incorrect information? Please consider the following example.

Thomas Edison achieved a lot of things during his lifetime, but now and then, he was off base. When Edison invited Nikola Tesla to see his new phonograph, and Tesla immediately saw room for improvements, Edison was enraged, and the two of them got into a lifelong feud. Edison’s conflict with George Westinghouse about DC versus AC for public electric power systems was another example where Edison went _______ (fill in the blank for yourself). I’ve read Edison biographies, which pointed out his strengths and his flaws, but those writings seem to have vanished from the internet. Writings today seem only to extol Edison almost as a deity.

I once read that when Edison was trying to choose a material for the filament of his electric light bulb, he was focused on what we would today call low-resistivity materials. Those filaments either didn’t work at all or had very short operating lifetimes. When he was told of Georg Simon Ohm and the fact of Ohm’s Law, Edison spurned that input and announced instead that he was not going to be limited by “Ohm’s silly law.” Eventually, though, he went to the carbon filament with its high resistivity and succeeded. Ohm’s law led him to that success.

Somewhere in the past, I came across a written item to the above effect about Edison, although recently, my trying to find that reference has been an exercise in futility (that deity thing again). However, something did come up during my searches, which I found very disturbing indeed (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Disturbing Google search results when trying to find a reference about Edison and his rejection of Ohm’s law.

When I entered a search term of Edison’s supposed “silly law” remark into Google, some of the search results that came up were full of stuff that was just plain, flat out, totally, utterly, and completely WRONG!

Please take a close look at the three images above and read them carefully. They are denials of the validity and applicability of Ohm’s Law. Vital concepts, as rudimentary as static resistance versus dynamic resistance and thermal coefficients of resistance, are simply ignored. At one point, we read “… the light bulb is not ohmic and does not behave like a resistor.”

The numerous mis-statements in these three screenshots are utterly appalling.

Now, consider some AI system getting trained with the inclusion of the above. That AI system is going to be capable of producing erroneous results. It is going to be capable of “hallucinating” and anyone taking those results as valid will have been grievously misled.

In spite of popular misconceptions and loads of public hype, AI doesn’t think. AI only regurgitates with formatting whatever can be found during its “training”. AI at its best is only an information retrieval tool, not a thinking entity with any level of judgment. Judgment still has to come from human brains.

Scary, isn’t it?

John Dunn is an electronics consultant, and a graduate of The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (BSEE) and of New York University (MSEE).

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