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A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 2 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

142 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

AI have no concepts, period. It doesn’t know what a person is, or what the laws are. It generates word salad that approximates human statements.

This isn't quite accurate. LLMs semantically group words and have a sort of internal model of concepts and how different words relate to them. It's still not that of a human and certainly does not "understand" what it's saying.

I get that everyone's on the "shit on AI train", and it's rightfully deserved in many ways, but you're grossly oversimplifying. That said, way too many people do give LLMs too much credit and think it's effectively magic. Reality, as is usually the case, is somewhere in the middle.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Jfc you dudes really piss me of with these contrarian rants, piss off it takes power and makes sophisticated word salads.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Oh, my bad, I thought the point of discussion boards was to have a discussion...

If your only goal is to spout misinformation and stick your fingers in your ears, I'll go somewhere else.