this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
540 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
12 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Also, with llms there is no "next time" it's a completely static model.

It's only a completely static model if it is not allowed to use it's own interactions as training data. If it is allowed to use the data acquired from those interactions, it stops being a static model.

Kids do learn elementary arithmetic by rote memorization. Number theory doesn't actually develop significantly until somewhere around 3rd to 5th grade, and even then, we don't place a lot of value on it at that time. We are taught to memorize the multiplication table, for example, because the efficiency of simply knowing that table is far more computationally valuable than the ability to reproduce it at any given time. That rote memorization is mimicry: the child is simply spitting out a previously learned response.

Remember: LLMs are currently toddlers. They are toddlers with excellent grammar, but they are toddlers.

Remember also that simple mimicry is an incredibly powerful problem solving method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

if it's allowed to use its own interactions as data, it will collapse. This has been studied. Stuff just does not work the way you think it does. Try coding one yourself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The "collapse" you're talking about is a reduction in the diversity of the output, which is exactly what we should expect when we impart a bias toward obviously correct answers, and away from obviously incorrect answers.

Further, that criticism is based on closed-loop feedback, where the LLM is training itself only on it's own outputs.

I'm talking about open-loop, where it is also evaluating the responses from the other party.

Further, the studies whence such criticism comes are based primarily on image generation AIs, not LLMs. Image generation is highly subjective; there is no definitively "right" or "wrong" output, just whether it appeals to the specific observer. An image generator would need to tailor itself to that specific observer.

LLM sessions deal with far more objective content.

A functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The inability to consider it's previous interactions denies it the ability to learn from it's previous behavior. The idea that AIs must not be allowed to train on their own data is functionally insane.