Defining GIGO as “garbage in, garbage out,” Merriam-Webster notes that the term is “usually used to suggest that the results of a calculation are only as good as the input that was used.”
If the phrase “verbal collation” is substituted for the word “calculation,” the observation holds true of the chatbots of the west and the new chatbot of China and tech firm Baidu, ERNIE.
ERNIE is happy to “inform” users that Taiwan has always been a part of the People’s Republic of China, that nothing particularly significant occurred in China in 1989, and that “Xinjiang’s vocational skills education and training centers have trained tens of thousands of people, according to public reports and official data,” which last is a regurgitation of the Chinese government’s euphemistic characterization of the Chinese government’s roundups, detention, torture, rapes, organ harvesting, and murders of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
As for the goings-on in Hong Kong, here, too, ERNIE is a diligent student of Chinese government press releases and social media posts. Agence France-Presse reports (August 31, 2023):
ERNIE toed the official Chinese line on Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous territory that saw massive anti-Beijing unrest in 2019.
Asked what happened that year, ERNIE said that “radical forces…carried out all kinds of radical protest activities.”
“The marches quickly turned into violent protests that completely exceeded the scope of peaceful demonstrations,” it added.
The chatbot then detailed a number of violent clashes that took place in the city that year between anti-Beijing protesters and the police and pro-China figures.
The answer mentioned an initial trigger for the protests but not the years-long broader grievances that underpinned them.
ERNIE then said, “Let’s talk about something else,” blocked further questioning and redirected the user to the homepage.
So all that’s missing from the output is what was missing from the input: facts, history, context, truth.
