Meta “programmed it to simply not answer questions,” but it did anyway.

  • snooggums@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    101
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    11 months ago

    Hallucinating is a fancy term for BEING WRONG.

    Unreliable bullshit generator is still unreliable. Imagine that!

    • doodledup@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      47
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      AI doesn’t know what’s wrong or correct. It hallucinates every answer. It’s up to the supervisor to determine whether it’s wrong or correct.

      Mathematically verifying the correctness of these algorithms is a hard problem. It’s intentional and the trade-off for the incredible efficiency.

      Besides, it can only “know” what it has been trained on. It shouldn’t be suprising that it cannot answer about the Trump shooting. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply doesn’t know how to use these models.

      • snooggums@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        11 months ago

        It is impossible to mathematically determine if something is correct. Literally impossible.

        At best the most popular answer, even if it is narrowed down to reliable sources, is what it can spit out. Even that isn’t the same thing is consensus, because AI is not intelligent.

        If the ‘supervisor’ has to determine if it is right and wrong, what is the point of AI as a source of knowledge?

        • doodledup@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          8
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          It is impossible to mathematically determine if something is correct. Literally impossible.

          No, you’re wrong. You can indeed prove the correctness of a neural network. You can also prove the correctness of many things. It’s the most integral part of mathematics and computer-science.

          For example a very simple proof: with the conjecture that an even number is 2k of a number k, then you can prove that the addition of two even numbers is again an even number (and that prove is definite): 2a+2b=2(a+b), since a+b=k for some k.

          Obviously, proving more complex mathematical problems like AI is more involved. But that’s why we have scientists that work on that.

          At best the most popular answer, even if it is narrowed down to reliable sources, is what it can spit out. Even that isn’t the same thing is consensus, because AI is not intelligent.

          That is correct. But it’s not a limitation. It’s by design. It’s the tradeoff for the efficiency of the models. It’s like lossy JPG compression. You accept some artifacts but in return you get much smaller images and much faster loading times.

          But there are indeed "AI"s and neural networks that have been proven correct. This is mostly applied to safety critical applications like airplane collision avoidance systems or DAS. But a language model is not safety critical; so we take full advantage.

          If the ‘supervisor’ has to determine if it is right and wrong, what is the point of AI as a source of knowledge?

          You’re completely misunderstanding the whole thing. The only reason why it’s so incredibly good in many applications is because it’s bad in others. It’s intentionally designed that way. There are exact algorithms and there approximation algorithms. The latter tend to be much more efficient and usable in practice.

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            11 months ago

            Your proof example is a proof from your discrete structures class. That’s very different than “proving” something like “the Trump assassination attempt was a conspiracy.”

            Otherwise we could have gotten rid of courts a long time ago.

            • doodledup@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              11 months ago

              Well obviously. But that was not at all what I said or claimed. I just said that you can prove certain properties of neural networks because others said that you can’t. And others also misunderstood LLMs in general. They believe it’s an information retrival service, which is wrong.

              Besides, your argument, as you’ve written it, applies to everything. Literally. From Wikipedia, to News, even up to your eyesight. What can you actually prove? I don’t understand the point you’re making and how that is related to LLMs.

          • markon@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            11 months ago

            Just like us. Sometimes it’s better to have bullshit predictions than none.

          • snooggums@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            4
            ·
            11 months ago

            The only reason why it’s so incredibly good in many applications is because it’s bad in others. It’s intentionally designed that way.

            lolwut

            • doodledup@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              11 months ago

              It’s designed in a ways that’ll make it inherently incorrect. Even on a physical basis (due to numeric issues). It’s not a problem of the algorithm because it has been designed that way. The problem is that you don’t know how to correctly use it.

              I can’t explain it any differently without getting overly technical. You wouldn’t understand it anyways, judging by your comment “lolwut”. If you want to learn how LLMs work specifically, there are plenty of ressources on the internet.

              • snooggums@midwest.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                11 months ago

                It’s designed in a ways that’ll make it inherently incorrect. Even on a physical basis (due to numeric issues). It’s not a problem of the algorithm because it has been designed that way. The problem is that you don’t know how to correctly use it.

                “It doesn’t make a good source of knowledge.”

                “Yeah, but it is designed to be inherently wrong”

                How does that make any sense when trying to use something for knowledge? Being inherently wrong is the opposite of helpful for knowledge.

                AI is great at pattern recognition, but knowledge isn’t pattern recognition. Needing to know when it gives false information requires the “supervisor” to already have that knowledge. That makes the AI less useful than a simple reference because at least the reference can come from a trusted source.

                If people stopped trying to jam AI into situations where being correct is important it wouldn’t be a problem. But excusing that because it is designed to be inherently wrong deserves another LOLWUT.

                • doodledup@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  4
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  11 months ago

                  How does that make any sense when trying to use something for knowledge? Being inherently wrong is the opposite of helpful for knowledge.

                  It was never designed to reproduce knowledge. It was designed to do reasoning and natural language processing and generation. You’re using it wrong.

                  LULWUT

                  If you don’t know what you’re talking about and don’t have any capacity to learn something new, it’s sometimes best to stop talking. Especially when you’re starting to get rude to knowlegable people that try to explain it to you.

              • uranibaba@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                11 months ago

                Can you recommend any for resource to start with? (If I can be picky, then something I can consume after a whole day of being a patent because there is no energy for much else.)

              • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                11 months ago

                It’s designed in a ways that’ll make it inherently incorrect. Even on a physical basis (due to numeric issues). It’s not a problem of the algorithm because it has been designed that way. The problem is that you don’t know how to correctly use it.

                So it is bad at things like giving or finding factual information. I agree, companies need to stop cramming it into everything (like search engines) for tasks that it is specifically bad at because it is not designed for it.

        • markon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          We should understand that 99.9% of what wee say and think and believe is what feels good to us and we then rationalize using very faulty reasoning, and that’s only when really challenged! You know how I came up with these words? I hallucinated them. It’s just a guided hallucination. People with certain mental illnesses are less guided by their senses. We aren’t magic and I don’t get why it is so hard for humans to accept how any individual is nearly useless for figuring anything out. We have to work as agents too, so why do we expect an early days LLM to be perfect? It’s so odd to me. Computer is trying to understand our made up bullshit. A logic machine trying to comprehend bullshit. It is amazing it even appears to understand anything at all.

          • snooggums@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            You know how I came up with these words? I hallucinated them. It’s just a guided hallucination.

            The the word hallucination means literally anything you want it to. Cool, cool. Very valiant of you.

  • catloaf@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    Kaplan noted that AI chatbots “are not always reliable when it comes to breaking news or returning information in real time,” because “the responses generated by large language models that power these chatbots are based on the data on which they were trained, which can at times understandably create some issues when AI is asked about rapidly developing real-time topics that occur after they were trained.”

    If you’re expecting a glorified autocomplete to know about things it doesn’t have in its training data, you’re an idiot.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      Some services will use glorified RAG to put more current info in the context.

      But yeah, if it’s just the raw model, I’m not sure what they were expecting.

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    The shooting happened after the end of the training date. Like asking windows 95 clippy about 9/11 and it saying it didn’t happen.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    Does the AI consistently say that, no matter who asks?

    Because if so, that’s not a hallucination.