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We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

simonwillison.net

271–280 of 485 posts

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#271
post #108
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it speaks my language - it uses masculine gender when speaking about itself.

That's interesting, what language is that? Also, is it possible to give a prompt to make ChatGPT switch to feminine gender?

Many gendered languages use male gender as the default when it's ambiguous or unknown, so that would be expected behavior.

And yes, it's absolutely possible to make it switch to whatever gender you want, and generally to pretend to be whatever you want it to be. The identity comes from the conversation context (including all the hidden messages), not from the LLM.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#272
I want to print essay that on poster and stick it in front of me, and everywhere. Not just that provocative part, but the emphatic part later in the essay too.

I am curious if no science fiction author has dealt with Robots lying? Isn't there an Asimov story Liar! which deals with Robot lying? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) (and possibly more stories?)

At least in that story, robot becomes catatonic.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#273
post #190

I’m surprised how many users of ChatGPT don’t realize how often it makes things up. I had a conversation with an Uber driver the other day who said he used ChatGPT all the time. At one point I mentioned its tendency to make stuff up, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I can think of at least two other non-technical people I’ve spoken with who had the same reaction.

It seems to me that even a lot of technical people are ignoring this. A lot of very smart folk seem to think that the ChatGPT either is very close to reaching AGI or already has. The inability to reason about about whether or not what it is writing is true seems like a fundamental blocker to me, and not necessarily one that can be overcome simply by adding compute resources. Can we trust AI to make critical decisions…

I don't think it's very close to reaching AGI, but I also don't see what that has to do with lying (or hallucinating). Even when it hallucinates the data, it can still soundly reason from it, and to my mind it's the latter part that is key.

As for trust... well, no, we can't. But the same question applies to humans. The real concern to me is that these things will get used as a replacement long before the hallucination rate and severity is on par with the humans that they replace.

One other interesting thing is that GPT-4 in particular is surprisingly good at catching itself. That is, it might write some nonsense, but if you ask it to analyze and criticize its own answer, it can spot the nonsense! This actually makes sense from a human perspective - if someone asks you a serious question that requires deliberation, you'll probably think it through verbally internally (or out loud, if the format allows) before actually answering, and you'll review your own premises and reasoning in the process. I expect that we'll end up doing something similar to the LLM, such that immediate output is treated as "thinking", and there's some back and forth internally before the actual user-visible answer is produced. This doesn't really solve the hallucination problem - and I don't think anything really can? - but it might drastically improve matters, especially if we combine different models, some of which are specifically fine-tuned for nitpicking and scathing critique.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It is illegal to make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

And they ended up with 11,000 years of interplanetary feudalism with slavery sprinkled in for good measure.

Better than getting extincted, I suppose.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#276

After a few weeks playing around with ChatGPT, my workflow with it has become: 0. Try to sign in, see the system is over capacity, leave. Maybe I’ll try again in 10 minutes. 1. Ask my question, get an answer. I’ll have no idea if what I got is real or not. 2. Google for the answer, since I can’t trust the answer 3. Realize I wasted 20 minutes trying to converse with a computer, and resolve that next time I’ll just ty…

If you expect ChatGPT to give you information or direct you to it (like Wikipedia or Google) you will be frequently disappointed. You may also be frequently pleased, but you often won’t be sure which and that’s a problem. ChatGPT is very good at transforming information. You need to show up with stuff and then have it change that stuff for you somehow. You will be disappointed less often.

It has been surprisingly terrible at this for me, lately. I had a pretty simple list, which was a list of monthly expenses in a separate list, like this.

Groceries - 200 Phone bill - 70

I just wanted it to add these expenses up. Exactly the type of thing it should be good at. New conversation with no context. It could not do it. I wrestled with it for a long time. It kept "correcting" itself to another wrong answer. Eventually I reported it and the report recommended the correct answer.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#277

The part that's concerning about ChatGPT is that a computer program that is "confidently wrong" is basically indistinguishable from what dumb people think smart people are like. This means people are going to believe ChatGPT's lies unless they are repeatedly told not to trust it just like they believe the lies of individuals whose intelligence is roughly equivalent to ChatGPT's. Based on my understanding of the appro…

GPT-2, 3 and 4 keep on showing that increasing the size of the model keeps on making the results better without slowing down. This is remarkable, because usually in practical machine learning applications there is a quickly reached plateau of effectiveness beyond which a bigger model doesn't yield better results. With these ridiculously huge LLMs, we're not even close yet. And this was exciting news in papers from ye…

Yet they still can’t get it to shut the hell up if it doesn’t know and to not make shit up to pad its answers.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#278

The part that's concerning about ChatGPT is that a computer program that is "confidently wrong" is basically indistinguishable from what dumb people think smart people are like. This means people are going to believe ChatGPT's lies unless they are repeatedly told not to trust it just like they believe the lies of individuals whose intelligence is roughly equivalent to ChatGPT's. Based on my understanding of the appro…

This (among other things) is why OpenAI releasing it to the general public without considering the effects was irresponsible, IMO.

Google and others had strong AI, but they are keep internal to maximize profits and spy on people.

OpenAI put it out there so we can see it, interact and have the conversation.

They have way more inside, ChatGPT is there to test it out in the real world progressively and so we get use to artificial superintelligence.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the definition of bug as “unexpected behavior”. So this isn’t a bug when it comes the underlying service. But for ChatGPT, a consumer-facing web app that can “answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge false premises and reject inappropriate requests”, then making stuff up and passing it off as true is unexpected behavior.

It sounds like this is unexpected behavior, even from the perspective of those developing at the lowest level in these models. From the essay: > What I find fascinating about this is that these extremely problematic behaviours are not the system working as intended: they are bugs! And we haven’t yet found a reliable way to fix them. Right below that is this link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09251 . From the introducti…

Whether it's a bug or not depends on the application, basically. You want the model to hallucinate things like that if it's writing a fiction book, for example.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#280
post #52

I think characterisation of LLMs as lying is reasonable because although the intent isn't there to misrepresent the truth in answering the specific query, the intent is absolutely there in how the network is trained. The training algorithm is designed to create the most plausible text possible - decoupled from the truthfulness of the output. In a lot of cases (indeed most cases) the easiest way to make the text plaus…

The training is to maximize good answers. Now there is lot of wrong answers that are close to the right one and ChatGPT does not expose it at the moment.

But in the API you can see the level of confidence in each world the LLM output.

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