this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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539
A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
142 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Alpaca is successfully doing this no?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So does GPT 3 and 4, it's still in use and it's cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

yeah. what's your point. I said hallucinations are not a solvable problem with LLMs. You mentioned that alpaca used synthetic data successfully. By their own admissions, all the problems are still there. Some are worse.