this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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?

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[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 6 days ago (31 children)

why did it? because it's intrinsic to how it works. This is not a solvable problem.

[–] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 47 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Exactly. LLMs don't understand semantically what the data means, it's just how often some words appear close to others.

Of course this is oversimplified, but that's the main idea.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

no need for that subjective stuff. The objective explanation is very simple. The output of the llm is sampled using a random process. A loaded die with probabilities according to the llm's output. It's as simple as that. There is literally a random element that is both not part of the llm itself, yet required for its output to be of any use whatsoever.

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[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 36 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers.

Stephen King is going to be in big trouble if these AI thingies notice him.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Praise Stephen Tak King! Glory to the Unformed Heart!

Tak!

Wan Tak! Can Tak!

Tak! Ah lah!

Him en tow!

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 77 points 6 days ago (3 children)

It’s frustrating that the article deals treats the problem like the mistake was including Martin’s name in the data set, and muses that that part isn’t fixable.

Martin’s name is a natural feature of the data set, but when they should be taking about fixing the AI model to stop hallucinations or allow humans to correct them, it seems the only fix is to censor the incorrect AI response, which gives the implication that it was saying something true but salacious.

Most of these problems would go away if AI vendors exposed the reasoning chain instead of treating their bugs as trade secrets.

[–] 100@fedia.io 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

just shows that these "ai"'s are completely useless at what they are trained for

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[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

reasoning chain

Do LLMs actually have a reasoning chain that would be comprehensible to users?

[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 2 points 4 days ago

https://learnprompting.org/docs/intermediate/chain_of_thought

It's suspected to be one of the reasons why Claude and OpenAI's new o1 model is so good at reasoning compared to other llm's.

It can sometimes notice hallucinations and adjust itself, but there's also been examples where the CoT reasoning itself introduce hallucinations and makes it throw away correct answers. So it's not perfect. Overall a big improvement though.

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[–] Brutticus@lemm.ee 31 points 5 days ago

"This guys name keeps showing up all over this case file" "Thats because he's the victim!"

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Oh, this would be funny if people en masse were smart enough to understand the problems with generative ai. But, because there are people out there like that one dude threatening to sue Mutahar (quoted as saying "ChatGPT understands the law"), this has to be a problem.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (14 children)

And to help educate the ignorant masses:

Generative AI and LLMs start by predicting the next word in a sequence. The words are generated independently of each other and when optimized: simultaneously.

The reason that it used the reporter's name as the culprit is because out of the names in the sample data his name appeared at or near the top of the list of frequent names so it was statistically likely to be the next name mentioned.

AI have no concepts, period. It doesn't know what a person is, or what the laws are. It generates word salad that approximates human statements. It is a math problem, statistics.

There are actual science fiction stories built on the premise that AI reporting on the start of Nuclear War resulted in actual kickoff of the apocalypse, and we're at that corner now.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

There are actual science fiction stories built on the premise that AI reporting on the start of Nuclear War resulted in actual kickoff of the apocalypse, and we're at that corner now.

IIRC, this was the running theory in Fallout until the show.

Edit: I may be misremembering, it may have just been something similar.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I haven't played the original series but in 3 and 4 it was pretty much confirmed the big companies like BlamCo! intentionally set things in motion, but also that Chinese nuclear vessels were already in place near America.

Ironically, Vault Tech wasn't planning to ever actually use their vaults for anything except human expirimentation so they might have been out of the loop.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Yeah, it's kinda been all over the place, but that's where the show ended up going, except Vault Tech was very much in the loop. I can't get spoiler tags to work, so I'll leave out the details.

What I'm thinking of, though, was also in Fallout 4. I've been thinking on it, and I remember now that what I'm thinking of is that it's implied that the AI from the Railroad quests fed fake info about incoming missiles to force America to fire. I still don't remember any specifics, though, and I could be misremembering. It's been a good few years after all, lol.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's not quite true. Ai's are not just analyzing the possible next word they are using complex mathematical operations to calculate the next word it's not just the next one that's most possible it's the net one that's most likely given the input.

No trouble is that the AIs are only as smart as their algorithms and Google's AI seems to be really goddamn stupid.

Point is they're not all made equal some of them are actually quite impressive although you are correct none of them are actually intelligent.

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[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

AI have no concepts, period. It doesn’t know what a person is, or what the laws are. It generates word salad that approximates human statements.

This isn't quite accurate. LLMs semantically group words and have a sort of internal model of concepts and how different words relate to them. It's still not that of a human and certainly does not "understand" what it's saying.

I get that everyone's on the "shit on AI train", and it's rightfully deserved in many ways, but you're grossly oversimplifying. That said, way too many people do give LLMs too much credit and think it's effectively magic. Reality, as is usually the case, is somewhere in the middle.

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[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 39 points 6 days ago (12 children)

I'd love to see more AI providers getting sued for the blatantly wrong information their models spit out.

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[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 17 points 6 days ago (5 children)

It's a fucking Chinese Room, Real AI is not possible. We don't know what makes humans think, so of course we can't make machines do it.

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