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Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

simonwillison.net

241–250 of 319 posts

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#241
[Sigh.] Most parents understand that there's a broad range of ages where a kid is either a bit fuzzy on the concept of "truth", or reflexively lies in certain situations ("Billy broke the vase!"), or can invent fairly elaborate lies for various reasons (avoid punishment, impress other kids, bored bullsh*tting).

Perhaps ChatGPT's "open relationship" with the truth could be explained in such terms...

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book [1] covers it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit#:~:text=The%20li... .

No, it does not. I have read the full text and it was garbage to my mind; another nonsense apology for liberal society's degeneracy.

The Right's devotion to truth and honesty in politics and society should serve as a beacon to us all.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't lie like a duck. It unintentionally says falsehoods. Lying is intentional.

That's irrelevant to whether it lies like a duck or not. The expression "if it X like a duck" means precisely that we should judge a thing to be a duck or not, based on it having the external appereance and outward activity of a duck, and ignoring any further subleties, intent, internal processes, qualia, and so on. In other words, "it lies like a duck" means: if it produces things that look like lies, it is lying, a…

> we should judge a thing to be a duck or not, based on it having the external appereance and outward activity of a duck, and ignoring any further subleties, intent, internal processes, qualia, and so on.

and the point here is we should not ignore further subtleties, intent, internal process, qualia, etc because they are extremely relevant to the issue at hand.

Treating GPT like a malevolent actor that tells intentional lies is no more correct than treating it like a friendly god that wants to help you.

GPT is incapable of wanting or intending anything, and it's a mistake to treat it like it does. We do care how it got to produce incorrect information.

If you have a robot duck that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and you dust off your hands and say "whelp that settles it, it's definitely a duck" then you're going to have a bad time waiting for it to lay an egg.

Sometimes the issues beyond the superficial appearance actually are important.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#244

> He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real. It had said yes. It turns out, asking an unreliable narrator if it's being reliable is not a sound strategy.

The trick is, you need two LLMs, one which always lies, and one which always tells the truth. Then you ask either LLM whether the other LLM would say it's reliable.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#246
post #7

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie. What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this? It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify so…

(joking) maybe they fed the LLM some postmodern text, so it got some notion of relativism and post structuralism...

But no, LLM's make things up, and it's a known problem and it is called 'hallucination'. even wikipedia says so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...

The machine currently does not have it's own model of reality to check against, it is just a statistical process that is predicting the most likely next word, errors creep in and it goes astray (which happens a lot)

Interesting that researchers are working to correct the problem: see interviews with Yoshua Bengio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5xsDMJMdwo and Yann LeCun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBjPyte2ZZo

Interesting that both scientist are speaking about machine learning based models for this verification process. Now these are also statistical processes, therefore errors may also creep in with this approach...

Amusing analogy: the Androids in "Do Androids dream of electric sheep" by Philip K Dick also make things up, just like an LLM. The book calls this "false memories"

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#247
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability the constraints of the model. It did that admirably. It's not its fault, or in my opinion OpenAI's fault, that the output is being misunderstood and misused by people who can't be bothered understanding it and project their own ideas of how it should function…

Correct. ChatGPT is a bullshitter , not a liar. A bullshitter isn’t concerned with facts or truth or anything. A liar is concerned with concealing the truth. Bullshitters are actually probably worse than liars because at least liars live in the same reality as honest people.

It's not obvious that a bullshitter is "probably worse" than liars. Just because a bullshitter didn't care to research whether some vitamin pill meets marketing claims doesn't mean they're mentally volatile or psychotic. It's a bit of a leap to go from bullshit to asking whether a person lives in the same reality as everyone else.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) sounds like intent is present there? 2) "the camera cannot lie" - cameras have no intent? I feel like I'm missing something from those definitions that you're trying to show me? I don't see how they support your implication that one can ignore intent when identifying a lie. (It would help if you cited the source you're using.)

If I use ChatGPT to "hallucinate" a source, and post it here, am I lying?

Did you get it to hallucinate on purpose, or perform willful ignorance? Then yes. Otherwise probably not.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#249
post #7

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie. What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this? It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify so…

ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability the constraints of the model. It did that admirably. It's not its fault, or in my opinion OpenAI's fault, that the output is being misunderstood and misused by people who can't be bothered understanding it and project their own ideas of how it should function…

Correct, it did not lie with intent. The best way to describe this in a “compared to human” way to describe it: is it is not mentally competent to answer questions

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#250
post #218

I’ve said this many times: stop using ChatGPT as a database. It does not contain facts. It may appear to contain some facts. Some may also be actually true. The truly useful usecase is as a reasoning engine. You can paste in a document and ask some questions about the facts in that document. Then it does a much better job, enough to be actually useful.

To some extent it does contain facts, but those facts are indistinguishable from non-facts, are just a small proportion of the dataset compared to everything else are indistinguishable from non factual information.

E.g. using text-davinci-003 (this is GPT3, not ChatGPT), "The moon is made of" completes to: Cheese 48.74%, rock: 31.66%, green 4.09% (98.75% followed by cheese), rocks 3.86%, and several other lower percentage tokens.

I wonder if there eventually will be a type of model that incorporates the ability to simultaneously do text completion while adhering to facts at the model level (rather than having to bolt it on top via context).

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