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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

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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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[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (19 children)

And to help educate the ignorant masses:

Generative AI and LLMs start by predicting the next word in a sequence. The words are generated independently of each other and when optimized: simultaneously.

The reason that it used the reporter's name as the culprit is because out of the names in the sample data his name appeared at or near the top of the list of frequent names so it was statistically likely to be the next name mentioned.

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. It is a math problem, statistics.

There are actual science fiction stories built on the premise that AI reporting on the start of Nuclear War resulted in actual kickoff of the apocalypse, and we're at that corner now.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

There are actual science fiction stories built on the premise that AI reporting on the start of Nuclear War resulted in actual kickoff of the apocalypse, and we're at that corner now.

IIRC, this was the running theory in Fallout until the show.

Edit: I may be misremembering, it may have just been something similar.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I haven't played the original series but in 3 and 4 it was pretty much confirmed the big companies like BlamCo! intentionally set things in motion, but also that Chinese nuclear vessels were already in place near America.

Ironically, Vault Tech wasn't planning to ever actually use their vaults for anything except human expirimentation so they might have been out of the loop.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, it's kinda been all over the place, but that's where the show ended up going, except Vault Tech was very much in the loop. I can't get spoiler tags to work, so I'll leave out the details.

What I'm thinking of, though, was also in Fallout 4. I've been thinking on it, and I remember now that what I'm thinking of is that it's implied that the AI from the Railroad quests fed fake info about incoming missiles to force America to fire. I still don't remember any specifics, though, and I could be misremembering. It's been a good few years after all, lol.

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