Technology

59118 readers

6622 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

539

A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 1 month ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

142 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.

The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.

But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If they aren’t liable for what their product does, who is? And do you think they’ll be incentivized to fix their glorified chat boxes if they know they won’t be held responsible for if?

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 0 points 1 month ago

If they aren’t liable for what their product does, who is?

The users who claim it's fit for the purpose they are using it for. Now if the manufacturers themselves are making dodgy claims, that should stick to them too.

[+] lunarul@lemmy.world -11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Their product doesn't claim to be a source of facts. It's a generator of human-sounding text. It's great for that purpose and they're not liable for people misusing it or not understanding what it does.

[–] Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So you think these companies should have no liability for the misinformation they spit out. Awesome. That’s gonna end well. Welcome to digital snake oil, y’all.

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago

I did not say companies should have no liability for publishing misinformation. Of course if someone uses AI to generate misinformation and tries to pass it off as factual information they should be held accountable. But it doesn't seem like anyone did that in this case. Just a journalist putting his name in the AI to see what it generates. Nobody actually spread those results as fact.