Dr. Steven Novella

Because the institutions are made of people.

Like if every doctor sucked, it didn't matter how good the institution of medicine was, it would suck because all the doctors suck.

It's the same thing.

If people are en masse irrational, then society is going to be irrational.

And that's kind of what we're living through right now.

So we need a critical mass of people who could at least have some way of dealing with misinformation, who are at least have some filter in place.

some level of humility, some trust in expertise, the idea of expertise, some way of evaluating information, of holding people accountable.

If we don't have that to a minimal critical amount, democracies can't function, and medicine can't function, and whatever, this increasingly complicated civilization that we're building for ourselves can't function until we just turn it all over to AI, right?

Sure.

But until then, until the AI overlords take over everything, we're in control.

Yeah, but I've been using AI a lot, mainly to evaluate it.

I do use it for some personal stuff, but as a science communicator, I want to be able to say I've used it and this is my experience with it.

It's a mixed bag.

It's an absolutely mixed bag.

So specifically, it all depends on how you prompt it, man, how you ask the question.

If you ask it, should I take a vaccine, you'll get one answer.

If you say, should I worry about vaccines, you'll get a very different answer.

So if you're prompting it in the negative, you'll get fed back what you want.

So I think the anti-vaxxers might be asking ChatGPT or whatever about it.

But they're getting the information they want.