8 Will AI make us more or less wise?

The evolution of AI means that GenAI tools are performing tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as making decisions, generating texts and images and translating languages. This is having a profound impact on our society and brings both challenges and opportunities.

There are concerns about LLMs like ChatGPT because (as you learnt in Course 1) the outputs are often wrong or misleading. Furthermore, there is a growing concern that LLMs are now being trained on data they themselves have generated. Since LLMs produce web content, and new models are trained on web data, this creates a feedback loop where AI-generated content influences future AI training.

The extent to which LLMs are producing false information is now being tracked – you can access the FACTS Grounding benchmark [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , which ranks an LLM’s ability to generate factually accurate responses, and learn more about how the benchmark evaluates LLMs.

The fifth course in our series, Ethical and responsible use of Generative AI, discussed the research by Schneiders et al. (2024), which explored the impact of LLMs on legal advice and the legal profession. It demonstrated that when laypeople are presented with advice, where they do not know whether it has been provided by an LLM or a lawyer, they are more likely to act on the advice provided by the LLM.

Notwithstanding that LLMs hallucinate and provide incorrect information, the persuasiveness of the output can undermine our ability to critically assess its accuracy. There are concerns around the potential for us to become overdependent on GenAI tools, and what impact that has on our ability to develop foundational knowledge, which then reduces our ability to critically review outputs from LLMs.

There is therefore potential for these tools to erode the very idea of trust and there are important ethical questions around the displacement of humans by AI technologies. The increasing sophistication of AI tools means that there is greater potential for AI to help us think or think for us. If we are going to use AI, then it is incumbent on us to consider whether AI helps or hinders us in becoming wiser.

Click on each number below to reveal some questions you need to consider.