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] 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?

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (33 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

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[–] rsuri 42 points 1 month 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 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] 11 points 1 month ago (13 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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[–] SkunkWorkz 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] 6 points 1 month 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] 40 points 2 months ago (17 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months 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] 34 points 1 month 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 10 points 1 month 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] 31 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We're already there, no AI needed. Rates are all generated by computer. Ask your agent why your rate went up and they'll say "idk computer said so".

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[–] gcheliotis 25 points 2 months 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] 17 points 2 months ago (7 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 10 points 2 months 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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month 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 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

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[–] n0m4n 14 points 2 months 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.

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