Why do people act like LLMs only hallucinate some of the time?
It’s not hallucinations here, multiple of the ridiculous results can be directly traced to redit posts where people are joking or saying absurd things
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Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
231–240 of 387 posts
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#232Your usual reminder that there was a guy at Google who was so impressed by their LLM that he considered it sentient. And this was two years ago when the AI was presumably far less developed than the current abonination. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...
> And this was two years ago when the AI was presumably far less developed than the current abonination.
It's gotten worse since then because the development effort has been on making it faster and cheaper.
If you use Gemini it's quite good, especially the paid one.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#233I'm waiting for some clever hacker to come up some sort of logic bomb that causes the learning sets to become worthless. Something innocuous to a non ai scientist human but is otherwise fatal to the LLM data sets.
It's just text. You cant make some text that's magically dangerous.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only reason you can't verify a server side LLM is you can't see the model. It is possible to look at its activations if you have the model.
Do the activations tell you anything more than what the LLM delivers in plain text? Other than for trivial bugs in the LLM code, I don't think so.
Yes, "making up an answer" will look different from "quoting pretrained knowledge" because eg the model might've decided you were asking a creative writing question.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don’t just seem it. They are by design. We talk about models “hallucinating” but that’s us bringing an external value judgement after the fact. The actual process of token generation works precisely the same. It’d be more accurate to say that models always hallucinate.
> The actual process of token generation works precisely the same I’d be wary of generalising it like that, it is like saying that all programs run on the same set of CPU instructions. NNs are function approximators, where the code is expressed in model weights rather than text, but that doesn’t make all functions the same.
> it is like saying that all programs run on the same set of CPU instructions
Turing machine is the embodiment of all computer programs. And then you come across the halting problem. LLMs can probably generate all books in existence, but it can't apply judgement to it. Just like you need programmers to actually write the program and verify that it correctly solves the problem.
Natural languages are more flexible. There are no functions libraries, or paradigms to ease writing. And the problem space can't be specified and usually relies on shared context. Even if we could have snippets of prompts to guide text generations, the result is not that valuable.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it’s not /justified/ belief Beliefs derived from the output of LLMs that are ‘right most of the time’ pass one facially plausible precisification of ‘justification’ in that they are generated by a reliable belief-generation mechanism (see e.g. Goldman). To block this point one must engage with the post-Gettier literature at least to some extent. There is a clear difference between beliefs induced by reading the out…
To be clear he is saying that the LLM is not capable of justified true belief, not commenting on people who believe LLM output. I don’t think your comment is relevant here.
That reading of the comment did occur to me, but I think neither dictionaries nor LLMs are capable of belief, and the comment was about the status of beliefs derived from them.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#237My whole qualm with this AI integration into search engines: it's a search engine, not a question engine. I go to google to search the internet for something, not ask it a question. IMO, asking AI for something is a different task than searching the internet. It's sorta the same problem as if I go into a store and ask an employee where something is, and they reply with "well what are you trying to do?"
Like the overly helpful person at the local hardware store.
What hardware store have you gone to where this was an issue for you?
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And i still think it is a spurious complaint, given that we have exactly the same limitations when dealing with any human agent We're not talking about an LLM that is trying to do the job of a human, here We're talking about an LLM that is trying to give authoritative answers to any question typed into the Google search bar It's already well past the scale that humans could handle Talking about human shortcomings w…
Nothing of the sort. I'm trying to understand why anyone cares about formal verifiability in this context, since it's not something we rely on when asking humans to answer questions for us. We evaluate any answer we get without such mathematical proofs, and instead simply judge the answer we're given on its fit and usefulness. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of even these nascent LLMs is fooling themselves. The proo…
> since it's not something we rely on when asking humans to answer questions for us
Because we interact with computers (which includes LLMs) differently than we do with humans and we hold them to higher standards
Ironically, Google played a large part in this, delivering high quality results to us with ease for many years. At one point Google was the standard for finding high quality information
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% correct , 80% correct lol. The thing is that truth/reality is not a thing that is resolvable. Not even the scientific method has this sort of expectation! You can imagine getting close to those percentages, with regards to consensus opinion. That's just a question of educating people to respond appropriately.
No. Whether a person should eat a certain number of small rocks each day is not a matter of opinion, it's not a deep philosophical problem and it's not a question whose truth is not resolveable. You should not be eating rocks.
You choose such an edge case question - how about this sort of thing:
Which is the best political party?
Are the side effects to X medical treatment?
I bet there are even cases when eating rocks is ok!
PS
It has been written about:
https://www.atharjaber.com/works/writings/the-art-of-eating-...
> Lithophagia is a subset of geophagia and is a habit of eating pebbles or rocks. In the setting of famine and poverty, consuming earth matter may serve as an appetite suppressant or filler. Geophagia has also been recorded in patients with anorexia nervosa. However, this behavior is usually associated with pregnancy and iron deficiency. It is also linked to mental health conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Would you deny a starving person information on an appetite suppressant?
Also here:
https://www.remineralize.org/2017/05/craving-minerals-eating...
> Aside from the capuchin monkeys, other animals have also been observed to demonstrate geophagy (“soil-eating”), including but not limited to: rodents, birds, elephants, pacas and other species of primates.[1]
> Researchers found that the majority of geophagy cases involve the ingestion of clay-based soil, suggesting that the binding properties of clay help absorb toxins.
^^ The point being that even your edge case example is not unambiguously correct.
Re: Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
#240As I mentioned previously, I've seen Bing's LLM stall for about a minute when asked something iffy but uncommon. I wonder if Bing is outsourcing questionable LLM results to humans. Anyone else seeing this?