AI is a powerful tool that will do as many great things as it messes up. One thing it does great is sound authoritative regardless of how correct what it is saying is. But this is nothing new. People have been creating websites with information they have been gathering off of social media and other websites and throwing it all together in a somewhat coherent manner to get web traffic. I have seen some of those websites been quoted here as support for whatever position the poster is taking. So we, as a community, are already not very good at checking sources.
There are now AI generated chameleon YouTube channels, Facebook groups, and websites. And it is disturbing how they often come up with Google, Bing, and other search engine results. AI will, hopefully, get better at pulling from authoritative sources, but if Google can't do it I wonder if AI can be any better. One good thing that might come from the onslaught of regurgitated and re-combined chameleon information is that it might press the community into checking sources. Do you know the author? Does the author exist outside of the digital platform they have created? Is there evidence they keep chameleons? What is the level of experience that they have with the species in question?
Because if the author, whether human or AI, does not have experience with what they are talking about then they are pulling from other sources and the question now is not about what they bring to the table, but how well they have sorted through what other people have brought to the table.
I have experimented with AI to see if it could help write podcast episodes or blog posts. And AI falls flat on its face at every turn if you want a factual and meaty topic discussion. I can't even get a decent skeleton from it that wouldn't take as much effort to edit it as it would to write it. Though AI is great if you want to create a year's worth of SEO heavy blog posts and you know your target beginner audience won't know the difference between chameleon cages or hookworm genera. I don't think I am any great visionary to predict that this is just the start of an explosion of websites with authoritative gibberish aimed at SEO and raking in Google adsense money.
