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?

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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.

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        29 days ago

        I’m no AI fanboy, but what you just described was the feedback cycle during training.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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?

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      the problem isn’t being pro ai. It’s people puling ai supposed ai capabilities out of their asses without having actually looked at a single line of code. This is obvious to anyone who has coded a neural network. Yes even to openai themselves, but if they let you believe that, then the money stops flowing. You simply can’t get an 8-ball to give the correct answer consistently. Because it’s fundamentally random.