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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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day 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.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

nOt JUsT anAlYzInG thE NeXT wOrD

Poor use of terms. AI does not analyze. It does not think, or decode, or even parse things. It gets fed sample data and when given a prompt (half a form) it uses statistical algorithm to finish the other half.

All of the algorithms are stupid, they will all hallucinate and say the wrong things. You can add more corrective layers like OpenAI has but you'll only be closer to the sample data. 95% accurate. 98%. 99%. It doesn't matter, it's always stuck just below average human competency for questions already asked countless times, and completely worthless for anything that requires actual independent thought.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Jfc you dudes really piss me of with these contrarian rants, piss off it takes power and makes sophisticated word salads.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 18 hours ago

Oh, my bad, I thought the point of discussion boards was to have a discussion...

If your only goal is to spout misinformation and stick your fingers in your ears, I'll go somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (31 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 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.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 3 days ago (5 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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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

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