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?
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.
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.
That’s not quite true. Ai’s are not just analyzing the possible next word they are using complex mathematical operations to calculate the next word it’s not just the next one that’s most possible it’s the net one that’s most likely given the input.
No trouble is that the AIs are only as smart as their algorithms and Google’s AI seems to be really goddamn stupid.
Point is they’re not all made equal some of them are actually quite impressive although you are correct none of them are actually intelligent.
nOt JUsT anAlYzInG thE NeXT wOrD
Poor use of terms. AI does not analyze. It does not think, or decode, or even parse things. It gets fed sample data and when given a prompt (half a form) it uses statistical algorithm to finish the other half.
All of the algorithms are stupid, they will all hallucinate and say the wrong things. You can add more corrective layers like OpenAI has but you’ll only be closer to the sample data. 95% accurate. 98%. 99%. It doesn’t matter, it’s always stuck just below average human competency for questions already asked countless times, and completely worthless for anything that requires actual independent thought.
Generative AI and LLMs start by predicting the next word in a sequence. The words are generated independently of each other
Is this true? I know that’s how Marcov chains work, but I thought neural nets worked differently with larger tokens.
The only difference between a generic old fashioned word salad generator and GPT4 is the scale. You put multiple layers correcting for different factors on it and suddenly your Language Model turns into a Large Language Model.
So basically your large tokens are made up of smaller tokens, but its still just statistical approximation of the sample data with little to no emergent behavior or even memory of what its saying as it says it.
It also exponentially increases power requirements, as the world is figuring out.
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.
This isn’t quite accurate. LLMs semantically group words and have a sort of internal model of concepts and how different words relate to them. It’s still not that of a human and certainly does not “understand” what it’s saying.
I get that everyone’s on the “shit on AI train”, and it’s rightfully deserved in many ways, but you’re grossly oversimplifying. That said, way too many people do give LLMs too much credit and think it’s effectively magic. Reality, as is usually the case, is somewhere in the middle.
Jfc you dudes really piss me of with these contrarian rants, piss off it takes power and makes sophisticated word salads.
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.
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.
