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A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 1 month 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?

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

randomly doesn't mean equiprobable. If you're sampling a probability distribution, it's random. Temperature 0 is never used, otherwise a lot of stuff would consistently hallucinate the exact same thing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Temperature 0 is never used

It is in some cases, where you want a deterministic / "best" response. Seen it used in benchmarks, or when doing some "Is this comment X?" where X is positive, negative, spam, and so on. You don't want the model to get creative there, but rather answer consistently and always the most likely path.