Navigating AI and fake news: Can we trust AI-generated answers?
Updated February 28, 2024.
Key takeaways
- How much we trust AI like ChatGPT depends on what we're asking it.
- AI can sometimes mix up real and fake info, so its answers aren't 100% trustworthy.
- For the best results, AI chatbots and search engines should team up.
- We can trust AI content more if experts check and validate it.
People often wonder how reliable answers generated by AI systems like ChatGPT are. These AI-powered responses are indeed impressive, but how much can we trust them?
There is a notable difference in the level of trust required when using these systems. If you're researching vacation spots in Portugal, the stakes are lower, and the trust demanded is different.
However, medical advice, like what to take for a headache, needs more trust. Google refers to this as YMYL (your money or your life), which involves more sensitive topics like health and finance.
AI developers face several challenges, including distinguishing between fake and real information and ensuring the accuracy of their training data. But before we can discern whether an answer is trustworthy, we need to understand how ChatGPT or Bard (now Gemini) generates answers.
AI’s challenge: Distinguishing fake from real
ChatGPT and Gemini consume content from the internet. This process involves crawling the web, scraping, indexing, and ranking content, similar to search engines. Then, they learn from this information to generate responses.
A crucial part of this process is tracking user behavior and understanding user journeys and satisfaction to determine how correct their answers are.
If AI is trained using incorrect information, its output will also be incorrect.
But can AI truly differentiate between fake and real information? Addressing this issue is a significant challenge that even search engines, despite their vast investments, have yet to fully overcome.
» Find out what type of content is still relevant for your website in the age of AI.
AI chat must integrate with search engines
Google and other search engines have been grappling with verifying information for over two decades, emphasizing that it's more than just an AI content generation challenge. However, search engines, particularly Google, possess sophisticated algorithms for determining content accuracy, making them instrumental in addressing this issue.
To truly maximize their potential, AI chatbots like ChatGPT need to integrate with search engines.
Without this collaboration, both systems are incomplete. Despite its advanced technology, Google lacks certain features that chat interfaces provide. On the other hand, chat systems require the informational backbone of a search engine for optimal functionality.
Trust and authenticity in AI content
Maintaining trust and authenticity presents a significant challenge for AI, a challenge it may not entirely overcome. This allows room for human opinion and expression.
Content creators must prioritize demonstrating the accuracy of their information to search engines like Google, a focus that will only intensify over time. This can be achieved by establishing authority through expertly curated and fact-checked content.
Much like human interaction, trust is essential, and we look for specific indicators to validate this trust. As SEOs, our responsibility is to provide these trust indicators to search engines, ensuring they recognize that our content is accurate.
At Entail, we're introducing features to enhance content trustworthiness. This includes showcasing the experts who created, reviewed, and fact-checked the content. We're also incorporating annotations to highlight parts of the content that have been fact-checked. This will foster increased trust from users and, consequently, from search engines.
» Learn about the impact of AI on intellectual property in content creation.
Going forward
SEOs should aim not just for higher rankings but also broader visibility in various platforms like Gemini and other AI chat systems. To achieve this, it will be important to focus on creating accurate social media content and clearly demonstrating its validity.
