I caught an article on AI skepticism and there was a point in the article where trust was mentioned. Specifically the reasons that people distrust an AI or tech tool is that it makes a mistake, so they stop using it. A few examples of this were using a writing AI that made a grammar mistake or a GPS routing device that added a wrong detour. In those cases the humans stopped using the assistance of the algorithm because they felt it wasn’t trustworthy.
What’s fascinating to me is that I had this same conversation with a human the day before. Someone mentioned they were working with a group and they misstated something. After that, the group stopped listening to all this person’s advice, thinking it was all suspect. Essentially one mistake overrides everything else.
Trust is a funny thing. It takes time to earn and gain trust from others, and it can be lost quickly with an action. Trust is a reliance, a belief, a confidence in something or someone. The way the GenAI is framed, and the way a system is presented to a user can have a huge impact on the level of trust we give to an GenAI-system. Tell someone the system is trusted or others are using it raises trust. Tell someone to be wary, and they’ll trust the system less.
I find that GenAIs are unreliable but not completely. They are trustworthy in some ways, but not in others. There are a few variations in the article (and in other places) that note that GenAIs are helpful, but we need to review their work. Essentially trust but verify, which isn’t a bad policy for any interaction with humans or AI systems. We learn to trust our co-workers, but that takes time. Some we might never trust and always review their work, while others we accept what they give us with minimal review.
It’s interesting to see such a wide variety of responses to the usefulness of GenAI systems. Some people find them amazing, some find them useless, some use them daily for small things, some never bother to submit a prompt. I find myself cautiously using them more and more, especially my local models, trying out different prompts in different areas. One thing I got out of the article is I ought to have more conversations with the GenAI, much as I would with a co-worker. I’ll try to do that more in the future and see how it goes…
In the meantime, how much do you trust AIs, other computer systems, or coworkers?
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
GenAI can never be as reliable, let alone better, than the reliability of it’s source materials which is the net. If only %50 of the net’s info is true then how could a GenAI without some additional resource produce better than %50 reliability?I imagine distrust in an in accurate GenAI comes from how those who promoted GenAI initially did so. Instead of being honest with the public about what these things really were they marketed them as AI or Artificial Intelligence and unless you work or study in that field this is going to come across to the avg person as being actual self-aware, human level intelligent AI. I view these AI’s as just easier to use search engines.
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Not sure it’s 50%, but it is only as reliable as the level of trust it’s given to various sources. So you might have 10 friends, and maybe you have 5 leaning one way, 5 another,but one has a high level of trust, so you lean more on their recommendation. Gen AI isn’t blindly averaging out source materials, but it has some training from the builders, so it might be more trustworthy in some ways if the trainers know more about that area
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The %50 was just a number I pulled out of the air and not meant to imply that in reality only %50 of the info out there is factual.
I hope we never get to where more trust in AI than humans is the norm. I would say you can trust the AI to not be biased as humans but as long as they are just rendering up that which they find you can’t trust them to not be biased. The one thing I would say you can have faith in is that with the GenAI there won’t be any in-between translation like you get with the telephone game. Where with a group of people the first whispers something into another’s ear and by the time it get’s to the end it’s mutated and sometimes by a lot.
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That’s probably true about the telephone game. I do think we might trust GenAIs more than humans in some ways. They might be better at recalling facts or details, where humans might mis-remember something. I also think that everyone and everything is biased. We’ve seen AI/nonAI software be biased based on training on data, which itself might be biased. What I hope we start to do is note what are the guidelines, goals and focus of training and make that available, so we can then start to understand our own biases better, and which biases might be trained into an AI.
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Memory recall is definitely going to b superior with the AI!
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