Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots from companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google are all regurgitating an Australian conspiracy theory about a legally suppressed list of Australian high-profile paedophiles, highlighting the risks of training generative AI on unverified data scraped from the open web.
The world’s largest tech companies have raced to release and incorporate generative AI features into their products that have been built on large language models, a recent advance in AI technology that can analyse enormous troves of data to understand the statistical relationships between words and phrases.
These products, best known for powering chatbots, give conversational answers to questions by predicting a response based on training data. While these chatbots can credibly provide information in response to questions not programmed by their creators, it also makes them vulnerable to flaws.
One problem is providing incorrect information from sources that they’ve been trained on. While their exact source of data is a secret, companies behind the world’s most popular chatbots say they’ve all been trained on “publicly available data” from the internet. But, as we all know, the quality of information online varies wildly.
This means that AI-powered search engines have told people to put glue in their pizza because a Reddit user called “Fucksmith” jokingly recommended it nearly a decade ago. In other cases, chatbots have directed users asking about election information towards conspiracy theory websites.
In Crikey’s testing, leading chatbots released by some of the world’s most valuable tech companies answered a question about a long-standing, popular Australian conspiracy theory by providing more information and treating it as real. These chatbots correctly identified other claims as conspiracy theories and warned against believing them.
The baseless theory goes that there has been a “90-year legal suppression order” on a police document listing 28 Australian political, government and media elites, including a former prime minister, who were suspected of being paedophiles. The source of this claim was Bill Heffernan — a former Liberal senator who once apologised after falsely accusing a judge of using Comcars to have sex with young men — who spectacularly brought it up in Parliament in 2015. While Heffernan’s list may exist, there is no proof that its cla