Chatbot hallucinations are poisoning web search

Back in July a researcher published a paper in which he showed that commonly used generative. 

AI tools will happily answer questions about books that don't exist. Microsoft Bing picked up that paper and happily ingested this new and entirely imaginary knowledge. 

Thankfully someone at Microsoft still cares about the truth - or at least about their share price if they are sufficiently embarrassed in the marketplace - and the fictional results have been removed. 

But seeing the rate at which Google results have gone downhill in recent years, I don't expect that state of affairs to last long... 

Take what I learned this week about Claude Shannon, the brilliant mathematician and engineer known especially for his work on information theory in the 1940s. Microsoft’s Bing search engine informed me that he had also foreseen the appearance of search algorithms, describing a 1948 research paper by Shannon called “A Short History of Searching” as “a seminal work in the field of computer science outlining the history of search algorithms and their evolution over time.” Like a good AI tool, Bing also offers a few citations to show that it has checked its facts.

GRTWT.