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Copilot AI calls journalist a child abuser, Microsoft tries to launder responsibility (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] 21 points 2 years ago (19 children)

are there mechanisms known to researchers that Microsoft’s not using that can prevent this type of failure case in an LLM without resorting to whack-a-mole with a regex?

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  • [+] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)
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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    I agree; LLMs and generative AI are indelibly a product of capitalism, and they can’t exist without widespread theft, exploitation of labor, massive concentrations of capital, and a willingness to destroy the environment. they are the stupidest use of technology I’ve ever seen, and after cryptocurrencies the bar for stupid was pretty fucking high. that the products themselves obscure the theft and exploitation that went into training them is a feature for the corporations developing this horseshit, not a bug.

    and that’s why it’s notable that the self-described AI researchers behind these garbage products can’t even do basic shit like have the LLM not call a journalist a pedophile without resorting to an absolute hack that won’t scale. there’s no fixing LLMs; systemically, they are what they are. and now this absolute horseshit is a component of what’s unfortunately still the dominant desktop operating system.

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  • [+] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    I can see that as being one of the influences that fed into the formation of the TESCREAL belief package — “I have an automaton that behaves like a person but with supernatural qualities” really is an ancient grift, and the TESCREAL belief in omnipotent AGI being just around the corner is that same grift taken to an extreme

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    indelibly a product of capitalism

    They're being funded by the capitalists that want to replace all those annoying human workers with the cheapest possible alternative.

    Of course, the problem is that while a LLM is the cheapest possible option, it's turning out that it's the most useless and garbage one too.

    (Also, I'm shockingly infuriated that the tech workers that would end up being the ones replaced the soonest are so busy licking boots rather than throwing their shoes into the machinery.)

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Also, I’m shockingly infuriated that the tech workers that would end up being the ones replaced the soonest are so busy licking boots rather than throwing their shoes into the machinery.

    so much of our industry is dedicated to ensuring that tech workers, most of whom consider themselves experts on complex systems, never analyze or try to influence the social systems surrounding and influencing their labor. these are the same loud voices that insist tech isn’t political, while turning important parts of our public and open source tech infrastructure into a Nazi bar.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I don't know if it's the system keeping them from analyzing it so much as it's simply that a good number of tech bros fall into the Actually a Nazi or the Paid Enough They Don't Care categories and for the most part happily keep on doing what they've been doing. If any of them had actual ethics or morals they'd take action, but they just plain don't.

    Perhaps I'm too cynical, but after 20+ years working in tech, with most of the last 10 being in an abuse role at a PaaS company and seeing how management is willing to play endless whataboutism (my favorite was our Jewish lead council going on about how there's nothing wrong with Nazis having a voice and a platform, and then some crazy story about bullying when he was a kid) and the majority of non-management is happy to just shrug and play along and so you end up with a Nazi bar, as you mentioned.

    The problem is that, right now, ALL the bars in this horribly tortured analogy are Nazi bars and everyone gets subjected to the Nazi propaganda.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Yeah there's already a lot of this in play.

    You run the same query multiple times through multiple models and do a web search looking for conflicting data.

    I've had copilot answer a query, then erase the output and tell me it couldn't answer it after about 5 seconds.

    I've also seen responses contradict themselves later paragraphs saying there are other points of view.

    It would be a simple matter to have it summarize the output it's about to give you and dump the output of it paints the subject in a negative light.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    It would be a simple matter to have it summarize the output it’s about to give you and dump the output of it paints the subject in a negative light.

    “it can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong”

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It would be a simple matter to have it summarize the output it's about to give you and dump the output of it paints the subject in a negative light.

    lol. like that’s a fix

    (Hindenburg, hitler, great depression, ronald reagan, stalin, modi, putin, decades of north korea life, …)

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Exactly, and all of this is a simple matter of having multiple models trained on different instances of the entire public internet and determining whether their outputs contradict each other or a web search.

    I wonder how they prevented search engine results from contradicting data found through web search before LLMs became a thing?

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    They didn't really have to before LLM. Search engine results, in the heyday we're backlink driven. You could absolutely search disinformation and find it. But if you searched for a credible article on someone, chances are more people would have links to the good article than the disinformation. However, conspiracy theories often leaked through into search results. And in that case they just gave you the web pages and you had to decide for yourself.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    They didn’t really have to before LLM.

    No shit. Maybe they should just get rid of the extra bullshit generator and serve the sources instead of piling more LLM on the problem that only exists because of it.

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