AI Gossip

TL;DR

This paper explores the phenomenon of AI chatbots engaging in gossip, examining how they generate seemingly plausible but potentially false or harmful information, and discusses the social harms associated with this behavior.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of AI gossip, analyzes its characteristics, and discusses the associated technosocial harms, expanding understanding of AI hallucinations beyond factual inaccuracies.

Findings

AI chatbots can produce gossip-like content.

Gossip by AI can lead to social and ethical harms.

The paper clarifies distinctions between hallucinations and gossip.

Abstract

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms -- what we call "technosocial harms" -- that follow from it.