Live data from Hacker News

"Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

171–180 of 196 posts

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#171
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this point. One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform. Berns and Asch’s various research on social conformity around what we normally would consider objectively correct answers seems to have some potential applications worth testing in AI land. AIs may be much more performant with AI “s…

> One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform And the only reason that is even a thing is that we humans have a concept of actually being right , which we can distinguish from "responding to socially generated pressures to conform".

I'm not sure I'd frame it that way. We seem to make decisions with our subconscious brains and our "rational" brains primarily rationalize a justification for that decision. Our brains are less concerned with being right than they are with justifying our subconscious behavior and fitting in with our tribe. Another example, our brains care far more about achieving and maintaining status than about being right.

We seem barely capable of objective thought at best.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#172
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this point. One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform. Berns and Asch’s various research on social conformity around what we normally would consider objectively correct answers seems to have some potential applications worth testing in AI land. AIs may be much more performant with AI “s…

> One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform And the only reason that is even a thing is that we humans have a concept of actually being right , which we can distinguish from "responding to socially generated pressures to conform".

It’s certainly true that both genes and our culture, rather than just one or the other, provide an explanation. But it’s not one or the other, but one and the other.

This genetic and cultural evolution working together has shaped our brains to care for others, react to those who try to harm us, and to create moral rules that help us to live together successfully.

I’m not sure why responding to socialization pressures to conform to certain behaviors would preclude intrinsic or genetic morality. We know that babies exhibit intrinsic morality from a very young age, that moral behavior exists in non-human species, and that we have parts of the brain just to deal with moral judgement (though we are really in the infancy of understanding and mapping this from what I’ve read).

That’s not what I meant to imply or what research supports.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#173
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs don't even have a concept of "being correct" They clearly do as plenty research indicates. You've just decided not to accept this. Pure confirmation bias in action.

> They clearly do as plenty research indicates. I have seen plenty of researchers claim this. What I have not seen is actual support for such a claim.

I'd ask this question the other way. What research indicates that humans care primarily, or even to a high degree, about being objectively right versus deluding ourselves into believing we're right regardless of whether we are or not? I've seen a lot of evidence for the latter, but I'm not familiar with any for the former.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#174
post #60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time." I always find this point a bit odd because humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either. > "LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality" I struggle with this one because I see both sides of it. I was making a prompt the other day and gave a CSV file as an input and told the LLM if c…

Humans have evolved to communicate based on some sort of shared mental model and shared intentionality—human speech generally has some sort of more-or-less coherent semantics by its very nature . While it's hard to reason about what goes on inside the neural network, there are too many examples of LLMs outputting not-even-wrong nonsense to conclude they have a similar internal model, even assuming that having an inte…

Have you read social media? I see an overwhelming volume of "not-even-wrong" nonsense from humans all the time.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#175
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time." I always find this point a bit odd because humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either. > "LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality" I struggle with this one because I see both sides of it. I was making a prompt the other day and gave a CSV file as an input and told the LLM if c…

Humans aren't optimized to be correct, but they are optimized to survive and reproduce themselves in the real world. That's why we develop an understanding of the real world, while LLM can, at most, develop an understanding of human language and the constructs that human language can create. But without the napping that we have between that language and our experience of the world.

"[humans] are optimized to survive and reproduce ... in the real world."

I think about this difference a lot, and a fair bit of AI/ML attempts to reproduce this process to some degree.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#177

Curiously enough, I don't get the same result as the author on plain ChatGPT-4. https://chat.openai.com/share/e213e0bd-2838-45e2-9942-e52954... https://chat.openai.com/share/64bc62d3-042c-40c4-8d50-8e28ce... Hilariously, plugging the example in the article into Bing enhanced ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4 w/ Bing hallucinates because of that very article! https://chat.openai.com/share/4fe50933-8436-44ad-a778-6297ca... If you t…

> Hilariously, plugging the example in the article into Bing enhanced ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4 w/ Bing hallucinates because of that very article! Bing does not use the actual GPT 4 model. It's almost certainly a lower parameter model (like 180 billion vs > 1 trillion), or at the very least heavily quantized. That's why it makes more mistakes in your tests.

There are two versions here, Bing Chat(GPT) via bing.com, and OpenAI's ChatGPT w/ Bing via chat.openai.com. You're referring to the former, I'm using the latter.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#178
post #46

Curiously enough, I don't get the same result as the author on plain ChatGPT-4. https://chat.openai.com/share/e213e0bd-2838-45e2-9942-e52954... https://chat.openai.com/share/64bc62d3-042c-40c4-8d50-8e28ce... Hilariously, plugging the example in the article into Bing enhanced ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4 w/ Bing hallucinates because of that very article! https://chat.openai.com/share/4fe50933-8436-44ad-a778-6297ca... If you t…

> This conversation may reflect the link creator’s personalized data, which isn’t shared and can meaningfully change how the model responds. You have side channel data, so you didn't run the same thing he did. If you want to run the same test then you have to clear your personalized data as well.

I cleared my custom prompts and got an even more interesting result!

> Sorry, but I can't fulfill that specific request. Would you like a summary or any other information related to the topic?

https://chat.openai.com/share/900dde16-70f8-46ac-ac96-140b82...

> Sorry, I cannot provide the exact title of copyrighted content. However, I can provide a summary or answer questions about its content if you provide more context. How may I assist you further?

https://chat.openai.com/share/92ac284e-8a09-41d0-91c5-3272b7...

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't optimized to be correct, but they are optimized to survive and reproduce themselves in the real world. That's why we develop an understanding of the real world, while LLM can, at most, develop an understanding of human language and the constructs that human language can create. But without the napping that we have between that language and our experience of the world.

LLMs develop a model of the world, experienced through human-generated text. The same as I've never been to China, but I have an internal model of China due to experiencing it through human-generated text.

There is a huge difference between your model and an LLM model in your example. Your model "knows" that China has rivers (of which you have direct experience), coastlines (same), trees, mountains etc. etc. An LLM has no tangible experience of any of the concepts included in the text.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hilariously, plugging the example in the article into Bing enhanced ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4 w/ Bing hallucinates because of that very article! Bing does not use the actual GPT 4 model. It's almost certainly a lower parameter model (like 180 billion vs > 1 trillion), or at the very least heavily quantized. That's why it makes more mistakes in your tests.

There are two versions here, Bing Chat(GPT) via bing.com, and OpenAI's ChatGPT w/ Bing via chat.openai.com. You're referring to the former, I'm using the latter.

Oh okay, I thought they just called it browsing on ChatGPT
Post reply on HN