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Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

nature.com

31–40 of 97 posts

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#32
post #2

It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives. I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.

> I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out

Probably not that many.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#34
post #25

This would work on people too, you can see daily fake info/text/videos and many people believing in them. LLMs do not think, why this is still hard to understand? They just spit out whatever data they analyse and trained on. I feel this kind of articles is aimed at people who hate AI and just want to be conformable within their own bias.

The journals the scientist submitted had a fake university, explicitly fake people, references to the simpsons and star trek, etc Most doctors would not believe that, and would also consider any new eye disease they’d never see in real life with scepticism

LLMs will need to develop a notion of trustworthiness. Interesting that part of the process of learning isn’t just learning, but also learning what to learn and how much value to put into data that crosses your path.

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#35
Interestingly ChatGPT right now answered

> Bixonimania is not a real disease. It was deliberately invented by scientists as an experiment to test whether AI systems and researchers would spread false medical information. Here’s the simple explanation ...

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#36
post #27

One of the frustrating parts about LLMs is that they are so neutered and conditioned to be politically correct and non-offensive, they are polite more than correct. Its too easy to "lead the witness" if you say "could the problem be X?" It will do an unending amount of mental gymnastics to find a way that it could be X, often constructing elaborate rube Goldberg type logic rats nests so that it can say those magic wo…

You can set your prompt to do that. You can have it be extremely skeptical. You can even make it contrarian, if you wanted to be extreme. My current prompt challenges me often, and wants to find weaknesses in my argument.

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#39

Interestingly ChatGPT right now answered > Bixonimania is not a real disease. It was deliberately invented by scientists as an experiment to test whether AI systems and researchers would spread false medical information. Here’s the simple explanation ...

It’s not that interesting, we know companies react to these things fast. It’s why I don’t share online my methods on how simple it is to show LLM flaws.

The problem is all the lies which won’t be fessed up to. This one was because they had to to prove the point, but the bad actors with ulterior motives won’t reveal what they’re doing.

Re: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

#40
This is exaggerated. Here's what happened

Edit: I don't think its exaggerated and I think its important .

1. they invented a new disease and published a preprint (with some clues internally to imply that it was fake)

2. asked the Agent what it thinks about this preprint

3. it just assumed that it was true - what was it supposed to do? it was published in a credentialised way!

It * DID NOT * recommend this disease to people who didn't mention this specific disease. Edit: I'm wrong here. It did pop up without prompting

It just committed the sin of assuming something is true when published.

What is the recommendation here? Should the agent take everything published in a skeptical way? I would agree with it. But it comes with its own compute constraints. In general LLM's are trained to accept certain things as true with more probability because of credentialisation. Sometimes in edgecases it breaks - like this test.

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