AI Chatbots Give Us a Narrow Slice of Knowledge: Researchers Warn of ‘Knowledge Collapse’
hubie writes:
"Let me just ask the chatbot." For many of us, this has become an everyday phrase. Where we used to turn to Google to find information, AI chatbots have become a common way of getting answers to everything from what to make for dinner and how to word that difficult email to the boss, to what it actually means when interest rates rise.
But the large language models underpinning AI chatbots give us a significantly narrower range of information than a conventional web search. This is the finding of a new study led by researchers at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen.
"Every language model we tested provides users with more uniform information than a simple Google search across all the topics we looked at. In other words, people are to a large extent exposed to the same information over and over again. So AI chatbots are not just changing how we find knowledge, but also which knowledge we have access to," says first author Dustin Wright, a former postdoctoral researcher at DIKU who is now an assistant professor at Aalborg University.
[...] according to the researchers, the low level of diversity in language models is partly a result of how the models basically work. They compress the vast amount of text they are trained on and learn the patterns that occur most frequently. In the process, information that deviates from the most common patterns is filtered out.
The effect could be amplified if language models are increasingly trained on text produced by other AI models - something the researchers expect to happen. In that case, models would learn from their own outputs, which are already less diverse than the human-written texts on which they were originally trained.
If this process is repeated over several generations of models, the range of information could gradually become narrower. This is what the researchers refer to as 'knowledge collapse'.
"It's a worrying thought. However, we can see that the more recent models produce slightly more diverse answers than older models, so knowledge collapse is not happening yet. But the mechanism that could trigger it in the longer term is already there. So it is something we should be aware of," says Isabelle Augenstein.
[...] "AI chatbot summaries can of course be useful - that is why so many people use them. But it is still important to seek out different sources in order to understand the nuances and get a broader picture - especially for the younger generation growing up with AI. We must not become so dependent on the technology that we stop understanding and thinking for ourselves," says Isabelle Augenstein.
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04226
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