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?

    • @wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de
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      205 hours ago

      Exactly. LLMs don’t understand semantically what the data means, it’s just how often some words appear close to others.

      Of course this is oversimplified, but that’s the main idea.

      • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 hours ago

        no need for that subjective stuff. The objective explanation is very simple. The output of the llm is sampled using a random process. A loaded die with probabilities according to the llm’s output. It’s as simple as that. There is literally a random element that is both not part of the llm itself, yet required for its output to be of any use whatsoever.

    • @Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      -95 hours ago

      It’s a solveable problem. AI is currently at a stage of development equivalent to a 2-year-old, just with better grammar. Everything it is doing now is mimicry and babbling.

      It needs to feed it’s own interactions right back into it’s training data. To become a better and better mimic. Eventually, the mechanism it uses to select the appropriate data to form a response will become more and more sophisticated, and it will hallucinate less and less. Eventually, it’s hallucinations will be seen as “insightful” rather than wild ass guesses.

      • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        84 hours ago

        also, what you described has already been studied. Training an llm its own output completely destroys it, not makes it better.

        • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          -32 hours ago

          This is incorrect or perhaps updated. Generating new data, using a different AI method to tag that data, and then training on that data is definitely a thing.

          • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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            6 minutes ago

            yes it is, and it doesn’t work.

            edit: too expand, if you’re generating data it’s an estimation. The network will learn the same biases and make the same mistakes and assumtlptions you did when enerating the data. Also, outliers won’t be in the set (because you didn’t know about them, so the network never sees any)

      • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 hours ago

        The outputs of the nn are sampled using a random process. Probability distribution is decided by the llm, loaded die comes after the llm. No, it’s not solvable. Not with LLMs. not now, not ever.

      • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        -42 hours ago

        Good luck being pro AI here. Regardless of the fact that they could just put a post on the prompt that says The writer of this document was not responsible for the act they are just writing about it and it would not frame them as the perpetrator.

        • @Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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          42 hours ago

          If you already know the answer you can tell the AI the answer as part of the question and it’ll give you the right answer.

          That’s what you sound like.

          AI people are as annoying as the Musk crowd.

          • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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            -41 hour ago

            You know what, don’t bother responding back to me I’m just blocking you now, before you decide to drag some more of that tired right wing bullshit that you used to fight with everyone else with, none of your arguments on here are worth anyone even reading so I’m not going to waste my time and responding to anything or reading anything from you ever again.

          • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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            -41 hour ago

            How helpful of you to tell me what I’m saying, especially when you reframe my argument to support yourself.

            That’s not what I said. Why would you even think that’s what I said.

            Before you start telling me what I sound like, you should probably try to stop sounding like an impetuous child.

            Every other post from you is dude or LMAO. How do you expect anyone to take anything you post seriously?