A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. - eviltoast
For one German reporter, the statistical underpinnings of a large language model meant his many bylines were wrongly warped into a lengthy rap sheet.

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?

  • rsuri@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    7 hours ago

    “Hallucinations” is the wrong word. To the LLM there’s no difference between reality and “hallucinations”, because it has no concept of reality or what’s true and false. All it knows it what word maybe should come next. The “hallucination” only exists in the mind of the reader. The LLM did exactly what it was supposed to.

    • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      18 minutes ago

      Well, It’s not lying because the AI doesn’t know right or wrong. It doesn’t know that it’s wrong. It doesn’t have the concept of right or wrong or true or false.

      For the llm’s the hallucinations are just a result of combining statistics and producing the next word, as you say. From the llm’s “pov” it’s as real as everything else it knows.

      So what else can it be called? The closest concept we have is when the mind hallucinates.

    • Hobo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      4 hours ago

      They’re bugs. Major ones. Fundamental flaws in the program. People with a vested interest in “AI” rebranded them as hallucinations in order to downplay yhe fact that they have a major bug in their software and they have no fucking clue how to fix it.

      • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        13 minutes ago

        It’s an inherent negative property of the way they work. It’s a problem, but not a bug any more than the result of a car hitting a tree at high speed is a bug.

        Calling it a bug indicates that it’s something unexpected that can be fixed, and as far as we know it can’t be fixed, and is expected behavior. Same as the car analogy.

        The only thing we can do is raise awareness and mitigate.