291–300 of 442 posts
After an interview with Cory Doctorow I saw recently, I'm going to stop anthropomorphizing these things by calling them "hallucinations". They're computers, so these incidents are just simply Errors.
We still use term bug. And no modern bug is cause by an Arthropod. In that sense I think hallucination is fair term. As coming up anything sufficiently better is hard.
As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately.
I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different league bad behaviour.
Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their refer…
Isn't this an underlying symptom of lack of accountability of our greater leadership? They do these things, they act like criminals and thieves, and so the people who follow them get shown examples that it's OK while being told to do otherwise. "Show bad examples then hit you on the wrist for following my behavior" is like bad parenting.
Which incentives can be set to discourage the negligence?
How about bounties? A bounty fund set up by the publisher and each submission must come with a contribution to the fund. Then there be bounties for gross negligence that could attract bounty hunters.
How about a wall of shame? Once negligence crosses a certain threshold, the name of the researcher and the paper would be put on a wall of shame for everyone to search and see?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, but here the equivalent situation is someone using a greek question mark (";") instead of a semicolon (";"), and you as a code reviewer are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail. Yes in theory you can go through every semicolon to check if it's not actually a greek question mark; but one as…
> as a code reviewer [you] are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail. As a PR reviewer I frequently pull down the code and run it. Especially if I'm suggesting changes because I want to make sure my suggestion is correct. Do other PR reviewers not do this?
No, because this is usually a waste of time, because CI enforces that the code and the tests can run at submission time. If your CI isn't doing it, you should put some work in to configure it.
If you regularly have to do this, your codebase should probably have more tests. If you don't trust the author, you should ask them to include test cases for whatever it is that you are concerned about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an industrial electrician. A lot of poor electrical work is visible only to a fellow electrician, and sometimes only another industrial electrician. Bad technical work requires technical inspectors to criticize. Sometimes highly skilled ones.
No doubt the best electricians are currently better than the best AI, but the best AI is likely now better than the novice homeowner. The trajectory over the past 2 years has been very good. Another five years and AI may be better than all but the very best, or most specialized, electricians.
Your post reads like AI precisely because while the grammar is fine, it lacks context - like someone prompted “reply that AI is better than average”.
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Some of the examples listed are using the wrong paper title for a real paper (titles can change over time), missing authors (I’ve seen this before on Google Scholar bibitex), misstatements of venue (huh this working paper I added to my bibliography two years ago got published now nice to know), and similar mistakes. This just tells me you hate academics and want to hurt them gratuitously.
> This just tells me you hate academics and want to hurt them gratuitously. Well then you're being rather silly, because that is a silly conclusion to draw (and one not supported by the evidence). A fairer conclusion was that I meant what is obvious: if you use AI to generate a bibliography, you are being academically negligent. If you disagree with that, I would say it is you that has the problem with academia, not…
If a carpenter builds a crappy shelf “because” his power tools are not calibrated correctly - that’s a crappy carpenter, not a crappy tool. If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist. AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. There needs to be serious social consequences to this kind of thing, otherwise we are tacitly endorsing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you truly think that you have an effective solution to hallucinations, you will become instantly rich because literally no one out there has an idea for an economically and technologically feasible solution to hallucinations
For references, as the OP said, I don't see why it isn't possible. It's something that exists and is accessible (even if paywalled) or doesn't exist. For reasoning hallucinations are different.
(In good faith) I'm trying really hard not to see this as an "argument from incredulity"[0] and I'm stuggling...
Full disclosure: natural sciences PhD, and a couple of (IMHO lame) published papers, and so I've seen the "inside" of how lab science is done, and is (sometimes) published. It's not pretty :/
As many pointed out, the purpose of peer review is not linting, but the assessment of the novelty and subtle omissions. Which incentives can be set to discourage the negligence? How about bounties? A bounty fund set up by the publisher and each submission must come with a contribution to the fund. Then there be bounties for gross negligence that could attract bounty hunters. How about a wall of shame? Once negligence…