I predict that implementing bots like these into social media platforms (in their current state) would be poorly received by the public. I think many people’s reaction to Grok’s probability estimate would be “Why should I believe this? How could Grok, or anyone, know that?” If it were a prediction market, the answer would be “because <economic and empirical explanation as to why you can trust the markets>”. There’s no equivalent answer for a new bot, besides “because our tests say it works” (making the full analysis visible might help). From these comments, it seems like it’s not hard to elicit bad forecasts. Many people in the public would learn about this kind of forecasting for the first time from this, and if the estimates aren’t super impressive, it’ll leave a bad taste in their mouths. Meanwhile the media will likely deride it as “Big Tech wants you to trust their fallible chatbots as fortune-tellers now”.
I predict that implementing bots like these into social media platforms (in their current state) would be poorly received by the public. I think many people’s reaction to Grok’s probability estimate would be “Why should I believe this? How could Grok, or anyone, know that?” If it were a prediction market, the answer would be “because <economic and empirical explanation as to why you can trust the markets>”. There’s no equivalent answer for a new bot, besides “because our tests say it works” (making the full analysis visible might help). From these comments, it seems like it’s not hard to elicit bad forecasts. Many people in the public would learn about this kind of forecasting for the first time from this, and if the estimates aren’t super impressive, it’ll leave a bad taste in their mouths. Meanwhile the media will likely deride it as “Big Tech wants you to trust their fallible chatbots as fortune-tellers now”.