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?
The AI did not “decide” anything. It has no will. And no understanding of the consequences of any particular “decision”. But I guess “probabilistic model produces erroneous output” wouldn’t get as many views. The same point could still be made about not placing too much trust on the output of such models. Let’s stop supporting this weird anthropomorphizing of LLMs. In fact we should probably become much more discerning in using the term “AI”, because it alludes to a general intelligence akin to human intelligence with all the paraphernalia of humanity: consciousness, will, emotions, morality, sociality, duplicity, etc.
the AI “decided” in the same way the dice “decided” to land on 6 and 4 and screw me over. the system made a result using logic and entropy. With AI, some people are just using this informal way of speaking (subconsciously anthropomorphising) while others look at it and genuinely beleave or want to pretend its alive. You can never really know without asking them directly.
Yes, if the intent is confusion, it is pretty minipulative.
Granted, our tendency towards anthropomorphism is near ubiquitous. But it would be disingenuous to claim that it does not play out in very specific and very important ways in how we speak and think about LLMs, given that they are capable of producing very convincing imitations of human behavior. And as such also produce a very convincing impression of agency. As if they actually do decide things. Very much unlike dice.