this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.