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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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[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 77 points 1 week ago

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@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago

Or just stop using buggy AIs for everything.

[-] 100@fedia.io 15 points 1 week ago

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

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 30 points 1 week ago

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

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[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 1 week ago

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

[-] wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 47 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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@lemmy.world 42 points 1 week ago

"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@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[-] theterrasque@infosec.pub 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago

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.

You're attempting to redefine "bug."

Software bugs are faults, flaws, or errors in computer software that result in unexpected or unanticipated outcomes. They may appear in various ways, including undesired behavior, system crashes or freezes, or erroneous and insufficient output.

From a software testing point of view, a correctly coded realization of an erroneous algorithm is a defect (a bug). It fails validation (a test for fitness for use) rather than verification (a test that the code correctly implements the erroneous algorithm).

This kind of issue arises not only with LLMs, but with any software that includes some kind of model within it. The provably correct realization of a crap model is still crap.

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[-] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

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[-] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 40 points 1 week ago

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

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[-] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 38 points 1 week ago

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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[-] Broken@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 week ago

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@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

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

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[-] Brutticus@lemm.ee 31 points 1 week ago

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

[-] tiramichu@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 13 points 1 week ago

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".

[-] futatorius@lemm.ee 0 points 2 days ago

Someone, somewhere along the line, almost certainly coded rate(2025) = 2*rate(2024). And someone approved that going into production.

[-] gcheliotis@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago

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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[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week ago

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@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week 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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[-] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago

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@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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[-] erenkoylu@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago

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

[-] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, just like the thousands or millions of failed IT projects. AI is just a new weapon you can use to shoot yourself in the foot.

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[-] n0m4n@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week 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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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
538 points (98.0% liked)

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