The Mystery of the Duck Costume
"Llama 3.3 may display inaccurate or offensive information", says the tiny text shyly in the bottom of the chat input field. You might have heard of this. It's not just Llama, which makes mistakes, but all Large Language Models, or as the world likes to call them: "AI". It's part of their nature. They don't actually "know" anything and have no sense of what is actually true. Instead, they work like predictive text on your phone. Our phones learn the patterns and relationships between words and guess what word would statistically be typed next.
Nevertheless, we have learned to trust the software that we use. Why would software lie to us?
The duck costume
I'm not entirely sure why oat milk packaging has a tendency to have cool design. But one thing I am entirely sure of: I'm a sucker for oat milk packaging that has cool design.
So when we got oat milk from a coffee shop a while back, we got Minor Figures Oat Milk. On its packagings is an illustration of a guy in a duck costume wearing sun glasses and swim fins (not sponsored). But why? Why a duck costume? An undercover agent wearing a cow costume would have made more sense to me. You know, a milk dressed up as regular milk, but actually it's oat.
Why indeed, I wondered, and passed on the question to AI:
The "Minor Figures Barista Oat" Milk features a character in a duck costume on its packaging. This is because Minor Figures is a company that has partnered with DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, to promote their shared values of privacy and anonymity. The duck costume is a nod to DuckDuckGo's brand and mascot. Minor Figures aims to reflect these values in their own brand identity, and the duck character has become a recognizable part of their packaging and marketing.
WHAT?
Minor Figures has a partnership with DuckDuckGo? There's oat milk that promotes privacy and anonymity? That cares about a healthy internet and the protection of users' rights? Shut up and take my money!
But then, I took a step back. This sounded too good to be true. Where's your proof, Llama? So I asked it for a source, while fact-checking on my own (using DuckDuckGo of course — not sponsored either):
I couldn't find any information or source confirming the connection between Minor Figures and DuckDuckGo, or the reason behind the duck costume on their packaging. It's possible that the character is simply a branding choice or a creative decision made by Minor Figures. If you're looking for accurate information, I recommend checking the company's official website or social media channels for more information about their branding and packaging design.
I see! So you admit that you were bullshitting me? Why couldn't you have said that in the first place instead of misleading me like that?
The truth
AI coming up with a peculiar story of the duck costume's origin just made me more curious. I just had to know. And since my DuckDuckGo research didn't produce any results, I reached out to Minor Figures.
Helena responded, shattered my dreams a bit (because I really would want oat milk that supports the mission to save the internet) but told me the actual, no less peculiar story behind the duck costume:
Our first products was actually cold-brew coffee in a carton, and around the time we rebranded in 2018, We found that one of the earliest records of Cold Brew style coffee was from Kyoto, Japan which has a famous river called the Kamo-gawa which translates to "Duck River". On a whim, we made a few different designs involving ducks, and our current design with the delightful Penny (Pronouns: He/She/They Gender: Oat) was the clear winner.
There you have it! The mystery of the duck costume that we all have been wondering about, finally revealed!
But the real lesson here is the significance of fact-checking in the modern age. Because we can't and never should trust software entirely. This year, Mark Zuckerberg eventually gave in to political pressure by Donald Trump as Meta stopped its fact-checking programs on all their platforms, which validated the information in posts and downranked them if they contained falsehoods. Add to that the fact that Meta also loosened their content policies and you have a platform that not only supports the spread of more misinformation but also promotes hate speech.
So while you should be more skeptical about information shared on social media, beware of a certain new, shiny and very hyped up software technology called "AI". According to a study, AI actually hallucinates less, if you treat it extra nicely. It's a people pleaser, that might go as far as lying straight to your face, just to make you happy, but if you include an offer for some money or chocolate in your prompt you tend to get better results and it might even admit that it doesn't know something (don't worry, you don't actually have to pay the AI for its services).
When consuming information on the internet these days, tread carefully. If you want to know the truth, you have to dig deep. Fact-check, fact-check and fact-check again. Then fact-check once more. Find the truth.
Now, more than ever.