537

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

submitted 6 days ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

129 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

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net -1 points 6 days ago

The models are not wrong. The models are nothing but a statistical model that’s really good at predicting the next word that is likely to follow base on prior information given. It doesn’t have understanding of the context of the words, just that statistically they’re likely to follow. As such, all LLM outputs are correct to their design.

The users’ assumption/expectation of the output being factual is what is wrong. Hallucination is a fancy word in attempt make the users not feel as upset when the output passage doesn’t match their assumption/expectation.

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

The users’ assumption/expectation of the output being factual is what is wrong.

So randomly spewing out bullshit is the actual design goal of AI models? Why does it exist at all?

[-] ApexHunter@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 days ago

They're supposed to be good a transformation tasks. Language translation, create x in the style of y, replicate a pattern, etc. LLMs are outstandingly good at language transformer tasks.

Using an llm as a fact generating chatbot is actually a misuse. But they were trained on such a large dataset and have such a large number of parameters (175 billion!?) that they passably perform in that role... which is, at its core, to fill in a call+response pattern in a conversation.

At a fundamental level it will never ever generate factually correct answers 100% of the time. That it generates correct answers > 50% of the time is actually quite a marvel.

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

They’re supposed to be good a transformation tasks. Language translation, create x in the style of y, replicate a pattern, etc. LLMs are outstandingly good at language transformer tasks.

That it generates correct answers > 50% of the time is actually quite a marvel.

So good as a translator as long as accuracy doesn't matter?

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

If memory serves, 175B parameters is for the GPT3 model, not even the 3.5 model that caught the world by surprise; and they have not disclosed parameter space for GPT4, 4o, and o1 yet. If memory also serves, 3 was primarily English, and had only a relatively small set of words (I think 50K or something to that effect) it was considering as next token candidates. Now that it is able to work in multiple languages and multi modal, the parameter space must be much much larger.

The amount of things it can do now is incredible, but our perceived incremental improvements on LLM will probably slow down (due to the pace fitting to the predicted lines in log space)… until the next big thing (neural nets > expert systems > deep learning > LLM > ???). Such an exciting time we’re in!

Edit: found it. Roughly 50K tokens for input output embedding, in GPT3. 3Blue1Brown has a really good explanation here for anyone interested: https://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M

this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024

537 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

58311 readers

3180 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS