this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
539 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

59593 readers
6512 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
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
539
A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)
submitted 2 months ago by Stopthatgirl7 to c/technology
142 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 months 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 46 points 2 months ago

Or just stop using buggy AIs for everything.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

reasoning chain

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month 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.