this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
503 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
57997 readers
5628 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We not only have to stop ignoring the problem, we need to be absolutely clear about what the problem is.
LLMs don't hallucinate wrong answers. They hallucinate all answers. Some of those answers will happen to be right.
If this sounds like nitpicking or quibbling over verbiage, it's not. This is really, really important to understand. LLMs exist within a hallucinatory false reality. They do not have any comprehension of the truth or untruth of what they are saying, and this means that when they say things that are true, they do not understand why those things are true.
That is the part that's crucial to understand. A really simple test of this problem is to ask ChatGPT to back up an answer with sources. It fundamentally cannot do it, because it has no ability to actually comprehend and correlate factual information in that way. This means, for example, that AI is incapable of assessing the potential veracity of the information it gives you. A human can say "That's a little outside of my area of expertise," but an LLM cannot. It can only be coded with hard blocks in response to certain keywords to cut it from answering and insert a stock response.
This distinction, that AI is always hallucinating, is important because of stuff like this:
That is some fucking toxic shit right there. Treating the fallibility of LLMs as analogous to the fallibility of humans is a huge, huge false equivalence. Humans can be wrong, but we're wrong in ways that allow us the capacity to grow and learn. Even when we are wrong about things, we can often learn from how we are wrong. There's a structure to how humans learn and process information that allows us to interrogate our failures and adjust for them.
When an LLM is wrong, we just have to force it to keep rolling the dice until it's right. It cannot explain its reasoning. It cannot provide proof of work. I work in a field where I often have to direct the efforts of people who know more about specific subjects than I do, and part of how you do that is you get people to explain their reasoning, and you go back and forth testing propositions and arguments with them. You say "I want this, what are the specific challenges involved in doing it?" They tell you it's really hard, you ask them why. They break things down for you, and together you find solutions. With an LLM, if you ask it why something works the way it does, it will commit to the bit and proceed to hallucinate false facts and false premises to support its false answer, because it's not operating in the same reality you are, nor does it have any conception of reality in the first place.
I fucking hate how OpenAi and other such companies claim their models "understand" language or are "fluent" in French. These are human attributes. Unless they made a synthetic brain, they can take these claims and shove them up their square tight corporate behinds.
This is circular logic: only humans can be fluent, so the models can't be fluent because they aren't human.
And it's universally upvoted...in response to an ais getting things wrong so they can't be doing anything but hallucinating.
And will you learn from this? Nope. I'll just be down voted and shouted at.
It's not circular. LLMs cannot be fluent because fluency comes from an understanding of the language. An LLM is incapable of understanding so it is incapable of being fluent. It may be able to mimic it but that is a different thing. (In my opinion)
You might agree with the conclusion, and the conclusion might even be correct, but the poster effectively argued 'only humans can be fluent, and it's not a human so it isn't fluent' and that is absolutely circular logic.
If we ignore the other poster, do you think the logic in my previous comment is circular?
Hard to say. You claim they are incapable of understanding, which is why they can't be fluent. however, really, the whole argument boils down to whether they are capable of understanding. You just state that as if it's established fact, and I believe that's an open question at this point.
So whether it is circular depends on why you think they are incapable of understanding. If it's like the other poster, and it's because that's a human(ish) only trait, and they aren't human...then yes.