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Scams and fraud

True or false? Organic or synthetic?

(32 Posts)
Elegran Thu 20-Oct-22 19:19:43

The University of Zurich have an online questionnaire (quite short) to test how good you are at distinguishing between accurate info and misinformation, and between human and computer-generated text. True or false? Organic or synthetic?

(My score was 10 out of 11 for accurate info vs misinformation, and 9 out of 11 for human vs computer.)

Elegran Fri 21-Oct-22 10:40:36

Curlywhirly Computers use the grammar and sentence structure that have been programmed into them, which are correct usage. Departures from correct usage are more likely to be done by humans. One of the examples in the questionnaire had a very short and dramatic sentence - I labelled that as humanly written (though I have no idea whether that was right, or whether it was the one in eleven that I got wrong.) It just didn't seem computery.

Elegran Fri 21-Oct-22 10:42:44

Sorry, one of the two I got wrong - I wish we had seen more detail about our successes and failures.

Elegran Fri 21-Oct-22 10:45:34

There is also the point that the more that is published online about how to distinguish info from misinfo, and human-speak from computerese, the more feedback the misinformers and bot-programmers have about how to avoid bamboozling us.

Doodledog Fri 21-Oct-22 11:41:12

That's pretty much what I said, Elegran, except that it only works for academic study. Some things can be verified in other ways. For me, it is the ability to check something out that makes me believe it.

Curlywhirly, I am not sure that if I sat the test again I would get the same score for the bot section - some of my answers were probably guesses.

Doodledog Fri 21-Oct-22 11:42:58

My posts are out of synch again grin. I was referring to your earlier post about peer review, Elegran.

I suppose if they printed the answers they would leak out and invalidate the tests. I would like to know too though.

lovebeigecardigans1955 Fri 21-Oct-22 11:54:20

I did quite well considering that the grammar used made some of the questions unclear as it was difficult to tell precisely what they were getting at - or maybe I'm just thick.