In preparation for next week’s keynote on generative AI and the crisis of trust, I picked up a book about trust by a philosopher, who I’ve decided not to name, when I saw it in the Tate bookshop earlier today. It began with a quote from bell hooks which caught my attention:
Trust is both a personal and a political endeavour, an affirmation of our shared humanity and our collective potential for growth and transformation. By embracing trust, by fostering connections, grounded in love and compassion, we have the power to not only change our own lives but also to reshape the world around us…
I wanted to post it on my blog, so I immediately looked for a citation. I could find no result for the exact quote but Google returned this site at the top of the list, where I found nearly the same quote:
In the end, trust is both a personal and a political endeavor, an affirmation of our shared humanity and our collective potential for growth and transformation. By embracing trust, by fostering connections grounded in love and compassion, we have the power to not only change our own lives but also to reshape the world around us, one relationship at a time.
The problem is that this site hosts imagined responses by philosophers to the question ‘what is trust?’ produced by ChatGPT. These (genuinely quite interesting) LLM outputs were posted in April 2023, only to feature in a book published in 2024. I can find no other source for the quote the author includes, other than this nearly exact quote produced by ChatGPT.
The most obvious explanation here is that they decided they want to start the book with a quote from bell hooks. They then typed in ‘bell hooks and trust’ which returns the site above as its second result. They didn’t read the introduction which explains the exercise with the LLM and instead copy & pasted the ChatGPT output into his book, without checking for the source of the citation.
The irony being that I now don’t trust the rest of the book. A philosopher writing a book about trust begins the book with such lazy scholarship that I now struggle to trust them. I hope I’m wrong. But without wishing to personalise things, I’m tempted to use this an example in next week’s keynote. It illustrate how LLMs are contributing to an environment in which lazy scholarship, cherry picking a quote from a google search, becomes much riskier given the circulation of synthetic content.
Mark Carrigan 