Learning caution in the age of AI

Online experiment reveals public is too trusting of tech that demonstrates possibly dangerous flaws, Wang Qian reports.

In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the question of whether a computer could talk like a human. Based on his recent one-month experiment, for Xiang Jinyu, a 23-year-old AI algorithm researcher in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, the answer is definitely "yes".

Using large language models, Xiang created an account on content community Zhihu pretending to belong to a woman working in Shanghai and born in 1993. Within 31 days, the account had answered 109 questions and had been viewed about 33,000 times, without anyone noticing the "woman" was actually AI.Mostly.

Only one Zhihu user named Buyun questioned the account, saying that it appeared to change persona, from male to female, and young to old, but it seems that almost no one else suspected the answers from the account were being generated by AI.