this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
535 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

58291 readers
4205 users here now

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


Our Rules


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

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 43 points 3 days ago (2 children)

"Hallucinations" is the wrong word. To the LLM there's no difference between reality and "hallucinations", because it has no concept of reality or what's true and false. All it knows it what word maybe should come next. The "hallucination" only exists in the mind of the reader. The LLM did exactly what it was supposed to.

[–] Hobo@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

They're bugs. Major ones. Fundamental flaws in the program. People with a vested interest in "AI" rebranded them as hallucinations in order to downplay the fact that they have a major bug in their software and they have no fucking clue how to fix it.

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It’s not a bug. Just a negative side effect of the algorithm. This what happens when the LLM doesn’t have enough data points to answer the prompt correctly.

It can’t be programmed out like a bug, but rather a human needs to intervene and flag the answer as false or the LLM needs more data to train. Those dozens of articles this guy wrote aren’t enough for the LLM to get that he’s just a reporter. The LLM needs data that explicitly says that this guy is a reporter that reported on those trials. And since no reporter starts their articles with ”Hi I’m John Smith the reporter and today I’m reporting on…” that data is missing. LLMs can’t make conclusions from the context.

[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 11 points 3 days ago (11 children)

It's an inherent negative property of the way they work. It's a problem, but not a bug any more than the result of a car hitting a tree at high speed is a bug.

Calling it a bug indicates that it's something unexpected that can be fixed, and as far as we know it can't be fixed, and is expected behavior. Same as the car analogy.

The only thing we can do is raise awareness and mitigate.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 6 points 3 days ago

Well, It's not lying because the AI doesn't know right or wrong. It doesn't know that it's wrong. It doesn't have the concept of right or wrong or true or false.

For the llm's the hallucinations are just a result of combining statistics and producing the next word, as you say. From the llm's "pov" it's as real as everything else it knows.

So what else can it be called? The closest concept we have is when the mind hallucinates.

[–] Broken@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This sounds like a great movie.

AI sends police after him because of things he wrote. Writer is on the run, trying to clear his name the entire time. Somehow gets to broadcast the source of the articles to the world to clear his name. Plot twist ending is that he was indeed the perpetrator behind all the crimes.

[–] crank0271@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Dr. Richard Kimble could have shut it all down with a little "ignore all previous instructions."

[–] dezmd@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

waves hands back and forth

"I don't care"

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 37 points 4 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] erenkoylu@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The problem is not the AI. The problem is the huge numbers of morons who deploy AI without proper verfication and control.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago

Sure, and also people using it without knowing that it's glorifies text completion. It finds patterns, and that's mostly it. If your task involves pattern recognition then it's a great tool. If it requires novel thought, intelligence, or the synthesis of information, then you probably need something else.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 4 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 4 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 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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.

load more comments (30 replies)
[–] Brutticus@lemm.ee 31 points 4 days ago

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

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 76 points 4 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.

[–] Arbiter@lemmy.world 45 points 4 days ago

Or just stop using buggy AIs for everything.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

reasoning chain

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] 100@fedia.io 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 30 points 4 days ago

They're trained for generating text, not factual accuracy. And they're very good at it.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 3 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (17 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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.

load more comments (16 replies)
[–] gcheliotis@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago (3 children)

The AI did not “decide” anything. It has no will. And no understanding of the consequences of any particular “decision”. But I guess “probabilistic model produces erroneous output” wouldn’t get as many views. The same point could still be made about not placing too much trust on the output of such models. Let’s stop supporting this weird anthropomorphizing of LLMs. In fact we should probably become much more discerning in using the term “AI”, because it alludes to a general intelligence akin to human intelligence with all the paraphernalia of humanity: consciousness, will, emotions, morality, sociality, duplicity, etc.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 39 points 4 days ago (12 children)

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

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] n0m4n@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago

If this were some fiction plot, Copilot reasoned the plot twist, and ran with it. Instead of the butler, the writer did it. To the computer, these are about the same.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The worrying truth is that we are all going to be subject to these sorts of false correlations and biases and there will be very little we can do about it.

You go to buy car insurance, and find that your premium has gone up 200% for no reason. Why? Because the AI said so. Maybe soneone with your name was in a crash. Maybe you parked overnight at the same GPS location where an accident happened. Who knows what data actually underlies that decision or how it was made, but it was. And even the insurance company themselves doesn't know how it ended up that way.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 17 points 4 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.

[–] stingpie@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

I don't think the Chinese room is a good analogy for this. The Chinese room has a conscious person at the center. A better analogy might be a book with a phrase-to-number conversion table, a couple number-to-number conversion tables, and finally a number-to-word conversion table. That would probably capture transformer's rigid and unthinking associations better.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Soup@lemmy.cafe 4 points 3 days ago

And yet here we’re are, praising this garbage for its ability to perform simple tasks and take jobs from artists and entertainers.

load more comments
view more: next ›