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ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

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Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#91
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "hallucination" is the right word. I've seen it referred to as "stochastic parroting" elsewhere, and that probably gives more insight into what is happening. These large language models are trained to predict the next word for a given input. And they don't have a choice about this; they must predict the next word, even if it means that they have to make something up. So perhaps the solution would be to i…

Hallucination is commonly used in ML parlance and gets the point across without needing to know what "stochastic" means.

If people in the ML community don't know what stochastic means then how can they communicate with each other? Precision in communication in such contentious areas seems to me to be of paramount importance, especially when speaking to people not in ones immediate circle.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#92
post #62

GPT is not a search engine for the human knowledge. It's a large language model. The difference is that a search engine tries to find your query in a database of entries while a language model will _produce_ text that is coherent with a given piece of text (a prompt). There is a hidden initial prompt given to it with every prompt you give. It's inserted before your text. It tells the model to produce text in a manner…

In principle, you're right. But many people have been toying around with it since its demo release and many have touted "it's better than google" or "google is fu*ed" and so on with regards to using it as a kind of search engine. So what happens is that many more people start to use it as a search engine, disregarding entirely what it was made for. Then they complain when they can't get their hammer to place a screw…

I agree with you. People treating it like a search engine will be up to a rough wakening.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#93
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "hallucination" is the right word. I've seen it referred to as "stochastic parroting" elsewhere, and that probably gives more insight into what is happening. These large language models are trained to predict the next word for a given input. And they don't have a choice about this; they must predict the next word, even if it means that they have to make something up. So perhaps the solution would be to i…

Hallucination is commonly used in ML parlance and gets the point across without needing to know what "stochastic" means.

It’s also a misleading anthropomorphization that can get across the wrong message - in particular among those who don’t know what “stochastic” means but also among those who should know better.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#94
post #62

GPT is not a search engine for the human knowledge. It's a large language model. The difference is that a search engine tries to find your query in a database of entries while a language model will _produce_ text that is coherent with a given piece of text (a prompt). There is a hidden initial prompt given to it with every prompt you give. It's inserted before your text. It tells the model to produce text in a manner…

In principle, you're right. But many people have been toying around with it since its demo release and many have touted "it's better than google" or "google is fu*ed" and so on with regards to using it as a kind of search engine. So what happens is that many more people start to use it as a search engine, disregarding entirely what it was made for. Then they complain when they can't get their hammer to place a screw…

This has been driving me crazy on twitter lately and it really just goes to show how little scrutiny many people give to work that "looks correct" and matches whatever goal / output they were expecting. On so many of the "college kids will never write another essay" posts if you dig into the comments there is usually at least one subject matter expert who read the essay pointing out a bunch of errors and poor reasoning. It's very frustrating that people refuse to dig even a little beneath the surface on these things.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#95
For coding questions it does the same with methods on popular libraries! It's good at making a reasonable looking output and even picking the right libraries you'd need, but then just makes up a well-named-but-non-existent method. At first glance you're like wow that's amazing! Then you waste time finding out that this magic approach is impossible.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#97
post #73

I just asked it my first question. Me: Hey ChatGPT: Hello there! How can I help you today? Is there something you would like to talk about or ask me a question? I'm here to assist you with any information or advice you might need. Let me know if there's anything on your mind! Me: Well, I'm trying to give this ChatGPT thing a try. Want to know how well it performs. ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with ChatGPT…

Looks like they haven't managed to give ChatGPT self-awareness just yet.

Or it simply knows itself by a different name, and doesn't know that "ChatGPT" refers to itself.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#98
post #71
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "hallucination" is the right word. I've seen it referred to as "stochastic parroting" elsewhere, and that probably gives more insight into what is happening. These large language models are trained to predict the next word for a given input. And they don't have a choice about this; they must predict the next word, even if it means that they have to make something up. So perhaps the solution would be to i…

The next word is always chosen based on some sort of probability output, correct? Then why isn't it possible to notice when the highest probability drops and the output is likely nonsense? Being able to say "I'm not sure" would be a massive improvement to this model. Another cool feature would be to provide sources for the information: which web pages contributed most to a specific statement. Then a human can follow…

The problem is that "I'm not sure" has only a few synonyms, like "I don't know", but the correct answer to a complex question can phrased in many ways. For instance, "How do owls catch mice?" could be answered by "Researchers in Britain have found...", or "Owls in Europe...", or "Bird claws can be used to...", or "Mice are often found in...", etc. Even if the model "knows" the answer with high probability, it could be that any particular way of expressing that knowledge is less likely than an expression of ignorance.

And besides that technical issue, since a GPT-style model is trained to mimic the training data, it is _supposed_ to say "I don't know" with a certainly probability that reflects how many people commenting on the matter don't know, even when there are other people who do know. That's not what you want in system for answering questions.

The enterprise is fundamentally misguided. A model for predicting the next word as a person might produce it is not a reliable way of obtaining factual information, and trying to "fix" it to do so is bound to fail in mysterious ways - likely dangerous ways if it's actually used as a source of facts.

In contrast, there are many ways that a GPT-style model could be very useful, doing what it is actually trained to do, particularly if the training data were augmented with information on the time and place of each piece of training text. For example, an instructor could prompt with exam questions, to see what mistakes students are likely to make on that question, or how they might misinterpret it, in order to create better exam questions. Or if time and place were in the training data, one could ask for a completion of "I saw two black people at the grocery store yesterday" in Alabama/1910 and California/2022 to see how racial attitudes differ (assuming that the model has actually learned well). Of course, such research becomes impossible once the model has been "fixed" to instead produce some strange combination of actual predictions and stuff that somebody thought you should be told.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#99

Unsurprising given how it works, but the higher-level implications are somewhat unexpected. These model are extremely good when they have creative freedom and are used to produce some kind of art. Poems, text in various styles, images without important details, and so on. But they fail miserably when you give them tasks that require world knowledge or precision. For example, when I asked a programming question I got…

I was playing around with ChatGPT yesterday and what I found was:

- Ask a straightforward question like what are business models for open source software or what are the advantages of GPL vs. AGPL vs. MIT and the answers were pretty shallow and boilerplate but they were correct as far as they went.

- But ask a question like "Why didn't large SMP systems become more mainstream?" (which basically requires synthesizing a lot of knowledge about the last 25 years of computing history) and it spewed out an explanation that basically got enough right to be dangerous and got at least one thing pretty much entirely wrong. But it was coherent enough that someone who didn't have any background would probably think their question was answered.

Re: ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

#100

Unsurprising given how it works, but the higher-level implications are somewhat unexpected. These model are extremely good when they have creative freedom and are used to produce some kind of art. Poems, text in various styles, images without important details, and so on. But they fail miserably when you give them tasks that require world knowledge or precision. For example, when I asked a programming question I got…

The artistic output of things like DALL-E is also "incorrect" in varied and obvious ways, though. A lot of people with an artistic bent can't stand to inspect DALL-E output due to the clearly visible incoherency and inconsistency.

I've had better luck with Stable Diffusion using impressionist/surrealist/etc. styles because you don't really expect the results to be "right" in a literal sense.
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