[Seriously?] AI denies spreading fake information

During her speech at the New Year drinks do in Omnia, President of the Executive Board
Houkje Sjeimovaara warned of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in spreading fake information. AI responded by announcing it disagreed completely with this, according to automatically generated messages on social media.

WUR is a stronghold of fact-checkers, a safe haven in a dangerous world where people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk no longer find it necessary to check the facts on X and Facebook. During her New Year’s speech in Omnia, Sjeimovaara promised to make things difficult for AI. ‘Watch out AI, because we’ve got our eyes on you and we are the facts people.’ She made a gesture pointing first to her eyes with two fingers and then stretching out her arm and pointing her index finger at an imaginary AI as if AI was personally present among the audience sipping their drinks.

We firmly deny spreading misleading information. In fact, our work is based in part on WUR research

But it turns out AI is not as imaginary as we thought. An automatically generated response from AI, a collaboration between ChatGPT and Gemini, appeared immediately on both Facebook and X: ‘We firmly deny spreading misleading information. In fact, our work is based in part on WUR research. We show, for example, that the climate is always changing, and our research demonstrates that nitrogen is essential for life on Earth. So what’s the problem?! But science is all about double checking, so we do our own research too. Glyphosate? Monsanto has repeatedly shown through its own research that this herbicide is safe. And while we’re on the subject of the multinationals on Wageningen campus: how much proof do you need that they have no involvement whatsoever in WUR’s gen-tech ventures? AI is actually looking forward to partnering with WUR. We’ll just run through the Principles of Collaboration, then everything will be guaranteed to be OK.’

The online post got lots of positive comments. For example, @57834gprut wrote: ‘AI for WUR President!’ And @XX_345 said: ‘Science is also an opinion.’ Musk himself even added a comment: ‘Life is too short for facts.’ That message got 84,654 likes.

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