Evan O'Hara

“The complication is that AI does not really plagiarize, in the way that someone copying an image or a block of text and passing it off as their own is plagiarizing. The AI stores only the weights from its pretraining, not the underlying text it trained on, so it reproduces a work with similar characteristics but not a direct copy of the original pieces it trained on. It is, effectively, creating something new, even if it is a homage to the original. However, the more often a work appears in the training data, the more closely the underlying weights will allow the AI to reproduce the work. For books that are repeated often in the training data-like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-the AI can nearly reproduce it word for word. Similarly, art Als are often trained on the most common images on the internet, so they produce good wedding photographs and pictures of celebrities as a result.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Enhancing Your Leadership Skills & Counseling Skills For Managers 3 Books Collection Set

“Traditional software is predictable, reliable, and follows a strict set of rules. When properly built and debugged, software yields the same outcomes every time. AI, on the other hand, is anything but predictable and reliable. It can surprise us with novel solutions, forget its own abilities, and hallucinate incorrect answers. This unpredictability and unreliability can result in a fascinating array of interactions. I have been startled by the creative solutions AI develops in response to a thorny problem, only to be stymied as the AI completely refuses to address the same issue when I ask again.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“An AI future requires that we lean into building our own expertise as human experts. Since expertise requires facts, students will still need to learn reading, writing, history, and all the other basic skills required in the twenty-first century. We have already seen how this broad-based knowledge can help people get the most out of AI. And besides, we need to continue to have educated citizens rather than delegate all our thinking to machines.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“And you can’t figure out why an AI is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the AI will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. The system has no way of explaining its decisions, or even knowing what those decisions were. Instead, it is (you guessed it) merely generating text that it thinks will make you happy in response to your query. LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Instead, they will give you an answer, expressing confidence.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI