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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-12 points

This is incorrect or perhaps updated. Generating new data, using a different AI method to tag that data, and then training on that data is definitely a thing.

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14 points
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yes it is, and it doesn’t work.

edit: too expand, if you’re generating data it’s an estimation. The network will learn the same biases and make the same mistakes and assumtlptions you did when enerating the data. Also, outliers won’t be in the set (because you didn’t know about them, so the network never sees any)

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1 point

Microsoft’s Dolphin and phi models have used this successfully, and there’s some evidence that all newer models use big LLM’s to produce synthetic data (Like when asked, answering it’s ChatGPT or Claude, hinting that at least some of the dataset comes from those models).

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-1 points

Alpaca is successfully doing this no?

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7 points

from their own site:

Alpaca also exhibits several common deficiencies of language models, including hallucination, toxicity, and stereotypes. Hallucination in particular seems to be a common failure mode for Alpaca, even compared to text-davinci-003.

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-4 points
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It needs to be retrained on the responses it receives from it’s conversation partner. It’s previous output provides context for it’s partner’s responses.

It recognizes when it is told that it is wrong. It is fed data that certain outputs often invite “you’re wrong” feedback from it’s partners, and it is instructed to minimize such feedback.

It is not (yet) developing true intelligence. It is simply learning to bias it’s responses in such a way that it’s audience doesn’t immediately call it a liar.

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9 points

Yeah that implies that the other network(s) can tell right from wrong. Which they can’t. Because if they did the problem wouldn’t need solving.

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