A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.
According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said.
It’s all hallucinations.
Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.
It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.
It really is sad. I often hear, “I even asked ChatGPT and it said…” as if that means their response is valid. I’ve heard people say it who I thought would know better, too.
The number of times I’ve heard that by people expecting it to win them arguments is incredibly discouraging.
Infuriating. It’s like an oracle. Except in late antique literature you can see that nobody that firmly believed in what oracles say (that’d be disciples making notes according to some procedure kept secret, probably involving mind-affecting substances, but also mathematics - you can already see how this is similar to LLMs), it was like visiting a known attraction, interesting - wow, I’ve been at the Delphi oracle, I’ve received an advice there.
And today those herds of unbelievable fools are less sane that that antique public.
few realize how they work and what they do.
Seriously, you have no idea. I have spent some time delving into the current models, human psychology, neurology and evolution and how people engage with each other or other entities, and the problem is already worse than we realize, and it’s going to get so, so much worse, because our species has major vulnerabilities in our entire conscious experience, these things are going to reshape the way people engage with reality itself at some point and we should all be a lot more concerned and I’m an old man yelling on the street corner with a cardboard sign huh.
State propaganda works by gaslighting you to think everyone around thinks some way, or at least a select set of people, and that you should adjust your behavior accordingly. It’s more complicated, some people are conformists, some are contrarians, but it works, there’s their own kind of working trap for everyone.
But it still has efficiency that can be improved.
With LLMs all your interactions are by default through such influence. They are averaging the bullshit, and information produced by them is fed to us all. That’s the opposite of what any talented or just useful person does, useful people try to increase the entropy, LLMs kill it.
It’s a dream of thieves, bullies, useless people, politicians, that kind of crap.
Basically “Us”, “1984” and whatever else has been written is being attempted via this tool. It’s not misdirected I think, but I also think it’ll fail, because evolution works in shorter feedback loops and those doing such things succeed in them, but fail in other directions which could use energy.
OK, I should stop writing such texts, they repeat, don’t help with migraines, they are obvious and probably wrong.
Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).
But great can come out of this case if it gets far enough.
Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.
But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.
TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).
Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.
Could we move away from calling it hallucinations as that would imply thinking? We should call it for what it is - bullshit.
this is confusing. did you think I meant you’re engaging in libel against llms or something? that’s the only way I can make sense of your reply.
