6 ms·

Microsoft's AI shopping announcement contains hallucinations in the demo

90 points by craigts 3y ago

pmontra 3y ago
Bing works for Microsoft and basically that's an ad. Wouldn't any human paid by Microsoft say in an ad that Surface Headphones 2 are the best ANC headphones?
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Stop calling them hallucinations. If we're going to anthropomorphize AIs, let's just call it bullshitting and lies. If we're not going to anthropomorphize AIs, then we need a different term
- dijksterhuis 3y ago
  In classification problems there’s a useful term for something similar already — False Positives… false positive (FP), Type I error A test result which wrongly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix Edit — Though I’m not sure how well that fits for a LLM (it’s more a series of false positives at each step of prediction in the sequence).
  - baq 3y ago
    In psychology, we've got a term which is almost 100% matching: confabulation. The only part which isn't correct is association with brain damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage (especially aneurysm in the anterior communicating artery) or a specific subset of dementias.
    - NeuroCoder 3y ago
      I think it's a good term for this but it also side steps the issue that this isn't a actually intelligence coming up with it. It's just machine noise
      - baq 3y ago
        It doesn’t matter if it’s noise, it only needs to be useful. Confabulations are not only not useful, they’re actively harmful.
- spott 3y ago
  To be fair, if we are going to anthropomorphize it, bullshit and lies implies some sort of negative intent that I’m not sure the models have. Bullshit is probably the closest, as people will bullshit for all sorts of reasons, but hallucinations is at least intent-neutral, which I think is the point.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    no not true - lazy, imperfect and damaged cognitive functions have similar results.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    A person can 100% believe in the lies they've been told, but that person is not hallucinating. Take for example climate change deniers; apart from the corporations and the politicians that abuse scepticism to maintain their power and wealth, many of the most fervent deniers truly believe the nonsense they're saying. Perhaps a more neutral term like "falsehoods" is applicable here.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      I think calling it lying requires intent, I’d just say those people are wrong rather than lying
- wtallis 3y ago
  Bullshitting and lies is what the humans selling the AI-powered services are doing. Hallucination, delusion and confabulation are what the AIs are doing (and some of the humans, too).
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    "Making shit up in order to fulfill some requirement" is the definition of lying, so whether it's a human or an AI, just making shit up in order to generate prompted output is flat out lying. Not "hallucinating". And the best part is that until LLM get valitidy checks baked in, even the things they get right are lies if presented with authority, because the LLM doesn't know whether it's true or not. In fact, the LLM doesn't know, full stop. It's still just a very well crafted autocomplete, and literally nothing more. So if we're going to anthropomorphise, call them what they'd be when humans do the same: lies, and damned lies.
    - irrational 3y ago
      > "Making shit up in order to fulfill some requirement" is the definition of lying I'd argue that there is an element of intent or agency involved. When a human makes things up intentionally or by choice, that is lying. When they do it unintentionally, that is not lying. It is usually called confabulation (or, honest lying - where the actor does not know they are not telling the truth). I don't think AIs/LLMs have agency or the ability to make things up intentionally. They are just doing what they are programmed to do and everything they produce looks the same to them. It is all true as far as the LLM is concerned. They might be confabulating, but I don't think they are lying.
      - TheRealPomax 3y ago
        The AI intentionally makes things up because that's literally the whole point of the LLM concept, both abstractly and concretely. WE MAKE IT LIE by conditioning it to lie. The "AI" part is not separate from the humans who made it, we are part of the system, and we made a computer that constantly and continuously lies in order to generate seemingly credible responses. We made a computer that lies, all the time, about everything. "...Why?" <insert the shouting robot comic here>
- SirMaster 3y ago
  Then tell us what we should call these manifestations... It's say to say stop calling it X, but then what are we supposed to call them?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Malfunctions? Breaking? Errors? Poor reliability?
    - SirMaster 3y ago
      The problem I have with this is it seems too generic. Shouldn't we try to categorize the types of errors at least somewhat?
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        Sure, and it's probably wise not to pick error categorizations that impute consciousness onto a thing that's 1) almost certainly not conscious, 2) behaves quite similarly to a conscious thing, and 3) might become conscious at some point in the near or distant future Hallucinations are definitionally features of conscious experience. Pick a different word or make one up!
        SirMaster 3y ago
        I guess to me hallucination doesn't necessarily imply consciousness. "an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present" I guess it depends on exactly how you define "experience" and "perception". But yeah there are better words than hallucination that are even more generic and do work better.
  - PretzelPirate 3y ago
    A popular term in the LLM space is 'confabulation': https://community.openai.com/t/hallucination-vs-confabulation/172639 https://community.openai.com/t/hallucination-vs-confabulatio... It fits better than the alternatives I've seen proposed.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  It’s the adopted term. I don’t see why it HAS to be the absolute exact closest possible term to what it would be in a human or something. It feels a bit like saying “stop calling it e-mail! It’s got nothing to do with real mail!”
  - chankstein38 3y ago
    Because people feel like they have nothing to add so instead of not adding anything they decide they have an issue with some minute detail that doesn't really matter and then start raising hell.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Bullshitting has a goal, hallucinations are random, seems apt.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  Given the euphemism "bug" substituting for "programming error" you'd be tempted to allow something similar for LLMs, but these are not errors, the output is by design. There is no motive for truth, just the most likely output, even if the likeliness is low.
  - IKantRead 3y ago
    > There is no motive for truth This also ignores the larger question that has been a known issue for at least 2,000 years: "Quid est veritas?"
    - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      You can substitute "accuracy" or "usefulness" for "truth".
- irrational 3y ago
  Call them confabulations. "Confabulation refers to the production or creation of false or erroneous memories without the intent to deceive, sometimes called 'honest lying'" "Confabulation is the creation of false memories in the absence of intentions of deception. Individuals who confabulate have no recognition that the information being relayed to others is fabricated. Confabulating individuals are not intentionally being deceptive and sincerely believe the information they are communicating to be genuine and accurate." https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijnn/international-journal-of-neurology-and-neurotherapy-ijnn-4-070.php https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijnn/international-jour...
  - tremon 3y ago
    The words confabulation and lie have the same problem when applied to the current state of "AI": they embody are certain level of intent; in the former case, the implication is that there was no intent to deceive, while a lie is the opposite. Still, they both imply intent, and for as far as I know nobody has been able to conclusively demonstrate intent on the part of a chatbot. Hallucination doesn't require intent.
    - irrational 3y ago
      Hallucinations are defined as “Perception of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences without an external stimulus and with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or as a response to a drug.” That doesn’t sound like what AI/LLMs are doing, at all. There is no mental disorder or drugs causing then to output what we would consider to be false information. The machine is not perceiving anything without an external stimulus. Everything they generate is from the stimulus we have given it.
    - JieJie 3y ago
      I like "fabrication" because it correctly implies the data is being pulled from somewhere and assembled. It does not put a judgment on the initial data, nor on the assembled product. It can take on a positive or negative meaning, depending on the context. "ChatGPT fabricated an answer that was technically correct, but misleading," or "ChatGPT was able to fabricate an innovative solution that had eluded us." Edit: And of course, everyone's favorite, "ChatGPT found guilty of fabricating case citations." https://www.techspot.com/news/98860-chatgpt-found-guilty-fabricating-cases-citations-manhattan-lawyer.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98860-chatgpt-found-guilty-fab...
- batch12 3y ago
  Maybe we could just call it babbling.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  > If we're going to anthropomorphize AIs, let's just call it bullshitting and lies. why? "bullshitting and lies" suggests that the AI is intentionally being deceptive. "hallucinations" conveys the idea that the information is incorrect, but the AI perceives it to be correct, which is more in line with what is actually happening.
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
    - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
      That seems more technically accurate but less likely to catch on since it's a much less common word. I think my parents are a lot more likely to understand from context a news story that mentions that "lawyers relied on an AI that hallucinated court cases" than "lawyers relied on an AI that confabulated court cases".
      - JieJie 3y ago
        I feel like "fabrication" is just sitting right there begging to be used.
  - nightski 3y ago
    I'd go further and say that the AI doesn't even perceive it to be "correct". It's just saying these words are likely to follow those words.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  If I make a claim based on prior knowledge and statistics I’ve learned over time, it’s not lying if it’s wrong. Lying has intent. Plenty of people say incorrect facts that they think are correct. In second grade, my cousin talked a lot about flax farmers in South America, after learning about them in class. Turns out the lesson was on quinoa farmers, and he forgot the original produce and “hallucinated” the statistics about flax farmers instead. Technically the term is confabulation. Was he lying? No because he wasn’t trying to tell us fake facts. LLMs have no intention of being wrong. Their “hallucinations” or whatever are just whatever makes sense from their statistical models. They’re really just confabulations.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    "Bullshitting" seems like a good term for accurate or inaccurate responses. Let's extend "LLMs have no intention of being wrong" to "LLMs have no inherent sense of being correct" - sometimes their predictions happen to be correct, sometimes they don't. But they're all hallucinations generated from the same process.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Bullshitting always requires a hidden intention to manipulate.
      - uoaei 3y ago
        Mislead is probably a more accurate term. Bullshit exists outside of the correct/incorrect binary and serves only to build narrative.
      - majormajor 3y ago
        Nah, it can be just talking without much rigor or verification of fact or anything, often with a loose boundary between opinion and fact - the "to talk in an exaggerated or foolish manner" definition. As in "my buddies and I were bullshitting about movies the other day." ChatGPT definitely talks with an exaggerated manner confidence-wise.
- shlubbert 3y ago
  I wouldn't get this worked up about a simple term that keeps things understandable for a layperson, lest your head might explode once you see how people are anthropomorphizing some AI "companion" bots.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  I dont understand why you are so worked up about the term and i also dont understand how your characterization of it as bullshitting and lies is accurate in any way.
- godelski 3y ago
  I'm not so concerned with that as I am with the fact that this isn't one. Article says > they tend to make up fake information – errors called “hallucinations.” Hallucinations are a certain kind of error. But what appears to have happened here is a _direct_ manipulation from Microsoft. Which is a risky play by them. It doesn't take much to erode trust. People tend to trust LLMs because they tend to get things right. But if people see a few things that they know is wrong, they will quickly stop trusting. If they see a few things as marketing, then they will very quickly stop trusting. It's not a hallucination, it is a filter. Microsoft manipulated the output to prefer their own products and boy is that a risky strategy.
  - Cagrosso 3y ago
    > Microsoft manipulated the output to prefer their own products and boy is that a risky strategy. Makes me wonder how they plan to monetize these chatbots and if they won’t just fizzle out like voice assistants. I don’t see how there won’t be concerns over asking a chatbot for the best pizza in town and receiving an answer like “Customers love the new Meat Lover’s Pizza from Pizza Hut! Brought to you by Pizza Hut… (list of pizza places here)”. Amazon couldn’t figure out how to make money off of Alexa, how are Chatbots any different.
    - godelski 3y ago
      Chatbots just seems like the marketing tool if we're being honest. I can't see any way to monetize them without destroying them. Even just having them could threaten their own existence (or make bloggers higher qualities if Google fucking decides to fix SEO...). LLMs on the other hand have plenty of use cases, though I think people are still way over hyped on them and aren't interested in how the boring stuff has good utility.
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  It's belief vs intent. Intent would be anthropomorphizing AI much more than belief and would denote a theory of mind. I'm not sure of a better term for things the model 'believes' to be true that are wrong. I think it's quite analogous given that the model then elaborates on the false belief in much the same way that humans appear to do with hallucinations. Additionally belief does not mean human; for example animals can have beliefs, even very rudimentary animals. I think is more of a way of self-containing the entity and treating it as a black box.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  IMO this whole concept of "hallucinations" is a made up buzzword (in the context of AI) to distract from the fact that the companies who are writing/training these models know full well that what they spit out is just as likely bullshit as it is "correct". Saying "we have no idea if it's going to spit out something accurate" doesn't sell. "oh it's hallucinating, how cute" is an easier sell.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  Ha! Yup, one of my friends who has been working with "transformer models" for years now told me "oh yeah, it's a bullshitter" when I tried my hand and got some truly bizarre, digressive, "addled", etc. output. OTOH, it reminded me very much of my own mind (reinforced by ADHD, in my case). This suggests to me, at least, that "the problem" isn't these models, per se. It's more like: these are probably only one module / layer in a system more similar to our brains. Just as scientists have identified distinct regions (more) involved in, say, language production, or (direct) visual perception, or etc., I'd suggest we've only just built the first substantially more practical / realistic hack / simulation (much like 3D game engines almost always use hacks - e.g., not even using the simple "Newtonian optics" model fully [i.e., "ray tracing"]) of a sort of language cortex. I'd further guess that it's going to take some maturation of a number of methods, technologies, etc. to realistically add more "cortices", but, I do think it's quite likely to happen in approx. the "decades" range... Highly highly speculative - rather naively based on the way other technologies have developed and with a little basis in work I've done more directly in neurobio etc. No deep(er) reason / analysis, but, just my current very tentative hypothesis.
  - apomekhanes 3y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted. Are there other opinions about the cortex or module idea? Is there a fundamental problem with that idea I'm missing?
- joker_minmax 3y ago
  Hinton called them "confabulations" according to this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey...
  - unqueued 3y ago
    I think "confabulation" is a way more accurate term, I wish it had stuck instead of "hallucination". A hallucination is a problem with input. Confabulation is false output. Confabulation is when a person mistakenly recalls details and tries to "fill in the blanks", without realizing what they are saying is untrue.
imchillyb 3y ago
A hallucination is an unexpected emergence. The 'making up' facts, because it cannot determine a fact from fiction, is entirely expected behavior. There is no 'hallucination' as the behavior is anticipated, expected, and entirely within normal operations processes. The bullshit comes from there being no model of trust these AIs subscribe to. I'd love-love-love to see these AI producers be held to some responsibility to verification of truth and ethics. These companies/universities/groups allowing their applications to bold-face-lie (misrepresent data with authority) to citizens should be top-priority to bash-in-the-face by legislators around the world.
- 12_throw_away 3y ago
  > There is no 'hallucination' as the behavior is anticipated, expected, and entirely within normal operations processes. Exactly. These are models that predict text sequences. These sequences often semantically express falsehoods, but the model's not "lying", it's not "hallucinating", and it's definitely not malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. There definitely are "lies" and "hallucinations" here though ... but they're coming from the hype-cycle-hucksters trying to convince us that this whole process somehow resembles "intelligence".
  - circuit10 3y ago
    It clearly has some level of intelligence, though it’s pretty far from human level. The hallucinations don’t make it less intelligent because it’s not “trying” to avoid them, as you seem to know already
    - hmcq6 3y ago
      > It clearly has some level of intelligence https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#LargPhilIssu https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#LargPhilIss...
      - circuit10 3y ago
        To me the Chinese Room thought experiment seems like it's meant to show that AIs can be intelligent, not the opposite? "Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing." Sure, but that doesn't mean the state of the program doesn't contain any understanding or intelligence, it's just that the human doesn't have a high-level view that can be used to decode that internal state. We're not asking whether the computer chip itself understands things but whether the something contained in the program running on it does. The human could also run a physics simulation as in https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ and recreate a human brain which would be no different to a physical brain in terms of behavior and so there would be no reason not to call it intelligent
cryptozeus 3y ago
Is it just me or does everyone trust AI opinions less and less ? Every time I ask it to find top 5 of something, I go and double check myself and almost always find it to be wrong. For example try searching for top 5 restaurants around me in bard. Some of them dont even exist lol and some are just random if you cross verify with actual popularity from yelp etc.
- TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  My trust factor for online opinion is ranked: 1) Online forums (adding 'reddit' or 'hacker news' to a search query) 2) GPT4 3) Google search
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  It's just reality sinking in.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Using language models for location or time based things is not recommended, as this usually requires non-textual data. Better to use them for general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. Asking them to do any complex calculations (especially when they also require non-text raw data, like inflation in a given time period) is also futile.
  - CSSer 3y ago
    > general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. They get all of these wrong too. It's like some AI-specific variant of the Gell-man amnesia effect. It's usually right in the first sentence, but if you really know the answer, it's often either very debatable or completely wrong by the halfway mark of the paragraph. Meanwhile, the associated brand authority is problematic.
    - simplyluke 3y ago
      Gell-man is exactly what I’ve been referencing in conversation recently. Any professional will gladly explain why their field is really much too nuanced and complex for LLMs to threaten in the near term before seamlessly explaining how close we are to all those other engineers/doctors/clerks being automated right away.
siva7 3y ago
Opinion pieces like shopping recommendations are quite hard for current LLMs. Either it is a hard fact - or pure creative work - that's where AI shines. Anything between and things get tricky
- 2bitencryption 3y ago
  This is one of those areas where the poor quality of the data influences the output, I think. There are so many garbage, lazily written product reviews, by websites that only exist to get people to click affiliate links. These sites only have one goal, which is to get you to click an affiliate link and make a purchase. So it is not in their best interest to say "You shouldn't buy this." Rather, they make a list of "top X Foobars", they start with a really expensive one, then they follow with a more reasonably-priced one, and give it a very positive review. It leads to clicks and purchases. Given this, it's not surprising to me that even the best LLMs carry pieces of this with them. Ask it to predict text describing some tech product on a sales page, and of course parts of that low-quality data will bleed through.
  - nowooski 3y ago
    For sure. The garbage in, garbage out problem is quite real for ecommerce applications.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    There is an argument to be made for automatically downweighting (be it training epochs or pagerank rating) anything with affiliate links. But I guess it would be trivial to hide them behind a redirect. That being said, I recently asked the Bing chatbot about the difference between two similar sounding printer models, and it gave a good explanation which I previously couldn't quickly find via Google. In case of Bing it is sometimes not completely clear to which degree its answer depends on the Web search, if it performed one, and to which degree it is just answering from its background knowledge (which could be prone to hallucination, but is less "gullible", so to speak). It provides sources, but not everything it says is necessarily present in the source. I'm actually surprised how quickly Bing is able to search (load and read) multiple websites, given that the loading times are not always trivial. It turns out they are much faster at reading than at typing. Indeed, each forward pass reads the entire context window, so once for every generated token!
yonatron 3y ago
Yeah. These "lies" are just artifacts of the way that LLMs work. They're meant to predict likely text given a prompt. And they do. If tasked with "write some marketing or a buying guide for product X", they will simulate likely marketing blurbs, nothing yo do with truth, that's not their wheelhouse. Predictive is a very different function, algorithm and problem-set than something like "accurately summarize existing reviews". This is a feature, not a bug. If you use something off label, you'll get off label results. MSFT should know better.
aeirjtaweraew 3y ago
Pretty soon some LLM owner is going to use the argument "Everyone is allowed to have their own opinions, and LLMs are too, their responses don't have to line up with someone else's preferences."
- jarofghosts 3y ago
  Alternative Intelligence
sporadicallyjoe 3y ago
Is anyone shipping AI products that DO NOT contain hallucinations? I thought that was pretty much a given.
- jarofghosts 3y ago
  Hallucinating is roughly how they work, we just label it as such when it's something obviously weird
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thewataccount 3y ago
    This is something I'm not sure people understand. LLM's only make a "best guess" for each next token. That's it. When it's wrong we call it a "hallucination" but really the entire thing was a "hallucination" to begin with. This is also analogous to humans - who also "hallucinate" incorrect answers, usually "hallucinate" incorrect answers less when they "Think through this step by step before giving your answer", etc.
- thewataccount 3y ago
  Well there isn't a human that never "hallucinates" in meaning we use for LLMs aka gives "incorrect answers" confidently. Human's brains use lots of heuristics - we don't "think step by step" through everything - instead we rapidly construct an answer for almost everything. What we say is "hallucinations" for AI in humans is "misspeaking, misremembering anything, off by 1 math/counting, missidentifying someone, using the wrong variable/method when programming, etc."
phyzome 3y ago
There is information, here, in the observations that all these "AI" demos contain blatant inaccuracies, with apparently no fact-checking having taken place. It's clear that these companies (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) do not care about accuracy, correctness, or the truth. It is not part of their business model. There is no respect for your time, your safety, your reputation. Your role as a customer is to be conned into using the products for long enough that a return on investment can be made; the companies will pivot to a new product as soon as the untrustworthiness of the old one becomes common knowledge. Short-term thinking. Desperation.
fizwhiz 3y ago
Why hasn't their stock plummeted like Google's?
predictabl3 3y ago
I'm sorry but watching people talk about the vast majority of the AI landscape is like watching people talk about FSD. Have fun on the hype treadmill.

90 points by craigts 3y ago

Bing works for Microsoft and basically that's an ad. Wouldn't any human paid by Microsoft say in an ad that Surface Headphones 2 are the best ANC headphones?

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Stop calling them hallucinations. If we're going to anthropomorphize AIs, let's just call it bullshitting and lies. If we're not going to anthropomorphize AIs, then we need a different term

dijksterhuis 3y ago
In classification problems there’s a useful term for something similar already — False Positives… false positive (FP), Type I error A test result which wrongly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix Edit — Though I’m not sure how well that fits for a LLM (it’s more a series of false positives at each step of prediction in the sequence).
- baq 3y ago
  In psychology, we've got a term which is almost 100% matching: confabulation. The only part which isn't correct is association with brain damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage (especially aneurysm in the anterior communicating artery) or a specific subset of dementias.
  - NeuroCoder 3y ago
    I think it's a good term for this but it also side steps the issue that this isn't a actually intelligence coming up with it. It's just machine noise
    - baq 3y ago
      It doesn’t matter if it’s noise, it only needs to be useful. Confabulations are not only not useful, they’re actively harmful.
spott 3y ago
To be fair, if we are going to anthropomorphize it, bullshit and lies implies some sort of negative intent that I’m not sure the models have. Bullshit is probably the closest, as people will bullshit for all sorts of reasons, but hallucinations is at least intent-neutral, which I think is the point.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  no not true - lazy, imperfect and damaged cognitive functions have similar results.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  A person can 100% believe in the lies they've been told, but that person is not hallucinating. Take for example climate change deniers; apart from the corporations and the politicians that abuse scepticism to maintain their power and wealth, many of the most fervent deniers truly believe the nonsense they're saying. Perhaps a more neutral term like "falsehoods" is applicable here.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I think calling it lying requires intent, I’d just say those people are wrong rather than lying
wtallis 3y ago
Bullshitting and lies is what the humans selling the AI-powered services are doing. Hallucination, delusion and confabulation are what the AIs are doing (and some of the humans, too).
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  "Making shit up in order to fulfill some requirement" is the definition of lying, so whether it's a human or an AI, just making shit up in order to generate prompted output is flat out lying. Not "hallucinating". And the best part is that until LLM get valitidy checks baked in, even the things they get right are lies if presented with authority, because the LLM doesn't know whether it's true or not. In fact, the LLM doesn't know, full stop. It's still just a very well crafted autocomplete, and literally nothing more. So if we're going to anthropomorphise, call them what they'd be when humans do the same: lies, and damned lies.
  - irrational 3y ago
    > "Making shit up in order to fulfill some requirement" is the definition of lying I'd argue that there is an element of intent or agency involved. When a human makes things up intentionally or by choice, that is lying. When they do it unintentionally, that is not lying. It is usually called confabulation (or, honest lying - where the actor does not know they are not telling the truth). I don't think AIs/LLMs have agency or the ability to make things up intentionally. They are just doing what they are programmed to do and everything they produce looks the same to them. It is all true as far as the LLM is concerned. They might be confabulating, but I don't think they are lying.
    - TheRealPomax 3y ago
      The AI intentionally makes things up because that's literally the whole point of the LLM concept, both abstractly and concretely. WE MAKE IT LIE by conditioning it to lie. The "AI" part is not separate from the humans who made it, we are part of the system, and we made a computer that constantly and continuously lies in order to generate seemingly credible responses. We made a computer that lies, all the time, about everything. "...Why?" <insert the shouting robot comic here>
SirMaster 3y ago
Then tell us what we should call these manifestations... It's say to say stop calling it X, but then what are we supposed to call them?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Malfunctions? Breaking? Errors? Poor reliability?
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    The problem I have with this is it seems too generic. Shouldn't we try to categorize the types of errors at least somewhat?
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Sure, and it's probably wise not to pick error categorizations that impute consciousness onto a thing that's 1) almost certainly not conscious, 2) behaves quite similarly to a conscious thing, and 3) might become conscious at some point in the near or distant future Hallucinations are definitionally features of conscious experience. Pick a different word or make one up!
      - SirMaster 3y ago
        I guess to me hallucination doesn't necessarily imply consciousness. "an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present" I guess it depends on exactly how you define "experience" and "perception". But yeah there are better words than hallucination that are even more generic and do work better.
- PretzelPirate 3y ago
  A popular term in the LLM space is 'confabulation': https://community.openai.com/t/hallucination-vs-confabulation/172639 https://community.openai.com/t/hallucination-vs-confabulatio... It fits better than the alternatives I've seen proposed.
scrollaway 3y ago
It’s the adopted term. I don’t see why it HAS to be the absolute exact closest possible term to what it would be in a human or something. It feels a bit like saying “stop calling it e-mail! It’s got nothing to do with real mail!”
- chankstein38 3y ago
  Because people feel like they have nothing to add so instead of not adding anything they decide they have an issue with some minute detail that doesn't really matter and then start raising hell.
ilyt 3y ago
Bullshitting has a goal, hallucinations are random, seems apt.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Given the euphemism "bug" substituting for "programming error" you'd be tempted to allow something similar for LLMs, but these are not errors, the output is by design. There is no motive for truth, just the most likely output, even if the likeliness is low.
- IKantRead 3y ago
  > There is no motive for truth This also ignores the larger question that has been a known issue for at least 2,000 years: "Quid est veritas?"
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    You can substitute "accuracy" or "usefulness" for "truth".
irrational 3y ago
Call them confabulations. "Confabulation refers to the production or creation of false or erroneous memories without the intent to deceive, sometimes called 'honest lying'" "Confabulation is the creation of false memories in the absence of intentions of deception. Individuals who confabulate have no recognition that the information being relayed to others is fabricated. Confabulating individuals are not intentionally being deceptive and sincerely believe the information they are communicating to be genuine and accurate." https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijnn/international-journal-of-neurology-and-neurotherapy-ijnn-4-070.php https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijnn/international-jour...
- tremon 3y ago
  The words confabulation and lie have the same problem when applied to the current state of "AI": they embody are certain level of intent; in the former case, the implication is that there was no intent to deceive, while a lie is the opposite. Still, they both imply intent, and for as far as I know nobody has been able to conclusively demonstrate intent on the part of a chatbot. Hallucination doesn't require intent.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Hallucinations are defined as “Perception of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences without an external stimulus and with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or as a response to a drug.” That doesn’t sound like what AI/LLMs are doing, at all. There is no mental disorder or drugs causing then to output what we would consider to be false information. The machine is not perceiving anything without an external stimulus. Everything they generate is from the stimulus we have given it.
  - JieJie 3y ago
    I like "fabrication" because it correctly implies the data is being pulled from somewhere and assembled. It does not put a judgment on the initial data, nor on the assembled product. It can take on a positive or negative meaning, depending on the context. "ChatGPT fabricated an answer that was technically correct, but misleading," or "ChatGPT was able to fabricate an innovative solution that had eluded us." Edit: And of course, everyone's favorite, "ChatGPT found guilty of fabricating case citations." https://www.techspot.com/news/98860-chatgpt-found-guilty-fabricating-cases-citations-manhattan-lawyer.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98860-chatgpt-found-guilty-fab...
batch12 3y ago
Maybe we could just call it babbling.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
> If we're going to anthropomorphize AIs, let's just call it bullshitting and lies. why? "bullshitting and lies" suggests that the AI is intentionally being deceptive. "hallucinations" conveys the idea that the information is incorrect, but the AI perceives it to be correct, which is more in line with what is actually happening.
- meindnoch 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    That seems more technically accurate but less likely to catch on since it's a much less common word. I think my parents are a lot more likely to understand from context a news story that mentions that "lawyers relied on an AI that hallucinated court cases" than "lawyers relied on an AI that confabulated court cases".
    - JieJie 3y ago
      I feel like "fabrication" is just sitting right there begging to be used.
- nightski 3y ago
  I'd go further and say that the AI doesn't even perceive it to be "correct". It's just saying these words are likely to follow those words.
vineyardmike 3y ago
If I make a claim based on prior knowledge and statistics I’ve learned over time, it’s not lying if it’s wrong. Lying has intent. Plenty of people say incorrect facts that they think are correct. In second grade, my cousin talked a lot about flax farmers in South America, after learning about them in class. Turns out the lesson was on quinoa farmers, and he forgot the original produce and “hallucinated” the statistics about flax farmers instead. Technically the term is confabulation. Was he lying? No because he wasn’t trying to tell us fake facts. LLMs have no intention of being wrong. Their “hallucinations” or whatever are just whatever makes sense from their statistical models. They’re really just confabulations.
- majormajor 3y ago
  "Bullshitting" seems like a good term for accurate or inaccurate responses. Let's extend "LLMs have no intention of being wrong" to "LLMs have no inherent sense of being correct" - sometimes their predictions happen to be correct, sometimes they don't. But they're all hallucinations generated from the same process.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Bullshitting always requires a hidden intention to manipulate.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      Mislead is probably a more accurate term. Bullshit exists outside of the correct/incorrect binary and serves only to build narrative.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      Nah, it can be just talking without much rigor or verification of fact or anything, often with a loose boundary between opinion and fact - the "to talk in an exaggerated or foolish manner" definition. As in "my buddies and I were bullshitting about movies the other day." ChatGPT definitely talks with an exaggerated manner confidence-wise.
shlubbert 3y ago
I wouldn't get this worked up about a simple term that keeps things understandable for a layperson, lest your head might explode once you see how people are anthropomorphizing some AI "companion" bots.
brigadier132 3y ago
I dont understand why you are so worked up about the term and i also dont understand how your characterization of it as bullshitting and lies is accurate in any way.
godelski 3y ago
I'm not so concerned with that as I am with the fact that this isn't one. Article says > they tend to make up fake information – errors called “hallucinations.” Hallucinations are a certain kind of error. But what appears to have happened here is a _direct_ manipulation from Microsoft. Which is a risky play by them. It doesn't take much to erode trust. People tend to trust LLMs because they tend to get things right. But if people see a few things that they know is wrong, they will quickly stop trusting. If they see a few things as marketing, then they will very quickly stop trusting. It's not a hallucination, it is a filter. Microsoft manipulated the output to prefer their own products and boy is that a risky strategy.
- Cagrosso 3y ago
  > Microsoft manipulated the output to prefer their own products and boy is that a risky strategy. Makes me wonder how they plan to monetize these chatbots and if they won’t just fizzle out like voice assistants. I don’t see how there won’t be concerns over asking a chatbot for the best pizza in town and receiving an answer like “Customers love the new Meat Lover’s Pizza from Pizza Hut! Brought to you by Pizza Hut… (list of pizza places here)”. Amazon couldn’t figure out how to make money off of Alexa, how are Chatbots any different.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Chatbots just seems like the marketing tool if we're being honest. I can't see any way to monetize them without destroying them. Even just having them could threaten their own existence (or make bloggers higher qualities if Google fucking decides to fix SEO...). LLMs on the other hand have plenty of use cases, though I think people are still way over hyped on them and aren't interested in how the boring stuff has good utility.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
It's belief vs intent. Intent would be anthropomorphizing AI much more than belief and would denote a theory of mind. I'm not sure of a better term for things the model 'believes' to be true that are wrong. I think it's quite analogous given that the model then elaborates on the false belief in much the same way that humans appear to do with hallucinations. Additionally belief does not mean human; for example animals can have beliefs, even very rudimentary animals. I think is more of a way of self-containing the entity and treating it as a black box.
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
IMO this whole concept of "hallucinations" is a made up buzzword (in the context of AI) to distract from the fact that the companies who are writing/training these models know full well that what they spit out is just as likely bullshit as it is "correct". Saying "we have no idea if it's going to spit out something accurate" doesn't sell. "oh it's hallucinating, how cute" is an easier sell.
tiffanyg 3y ago
Ha! Yup, one of my friends who has been working with "transformer models" for years now told me "oh yeah, it's a bullshitter" when I tried my hand and got some truly bizarre, digressive, "addled", etc. output. OTOH, it reminded me very much of my own mind (reinforced by ADHD, in my case). This suggests to me, at least, that "the problem" isn't these models, per se. It's more like: these are probably only one module / layer in a system more similar to our brains. Just as scientists have identified distinct regions (more) involved in, say, language production, or (direct) visual perception, or etc., I'd suggest we've only just built the first substantially more practical / realistic hack / simulation (much like 3D game engines almost always use hacks - e.g., not even using the simple "Newtonian optics" model fully [i.e., "ray tracing"]) of a sort of language cortex. I'd further guess that it's going to take some maturation of a number of methods, technologies, etc. to realistically add more "cortices", but, I do think it's quite likely to happen in approx. the "decades" range... Highly highly speculative - rather naively based on the way other technologies have developed and with a little basis in work I've done more directly in neurobio etc. No deep(er) reason / analysis, but, just my current very tentative hypothesis.
- apomekhanes 3y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. Are there other opinions about the cortex or module idea? Is there a fundamental problem with that idea I'm missing?
joker_minmax 3y ago
Hinton called them "confabulations" according to this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey...
- unqueued 3y ago
  I think "confabulation" is a way more accurate term, I wish it had stuck instead of "hallucination". A hallucination is a problem with input. Confabulation is false output. Confabulation is when a person mistakenly recalls details and tries to "fill in the blanks", without realizing what they are saying is untrue.

imchillyb 3y ago

A hallucination is an unexpected emergence. The 'making up' facts, because it cannot determine a fact from fiction, is entirely expected behavior. There is no 'hallucination' as the behavior is anticipated, expected, and entirely within normal operations processes. The bullshit comes from there being no model of trust these AIs subscribe to. I'd love-love-love to see these AI producers be held to some responsibility to verification of truth and ethics. These companies/universities/groups allowing their applications to bold-face-lie (misrepresent data with authority) to citizens should be top-priority to bash-in-the-face by legislators around the world.

12_throw_away 3y ago
> There is no 'hallucination' as the behavior is anticipated, expected, and entirely within normal operations processes. Exactly. These are models that predict text sequences. These sequences often semantically express falsehoods, but the model's not "lying", it's not "hallucinating", and it's definitely not malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. There definitely are "lies" and "hallucinations" here though ... but they're coming from the hype-cycle-hucksters trying to convince us that this whole process somehow resembles "intelligence".
- circuit10 3y ago
  It clearly has some level of intelligence, though it’s pretty far from human level. The hallucinations don’t make it less intelligent because it’s not “trying” to avoid them, as you seem to know already
  - hmcq6 3y ago
    > It clearly has some level of intelligence https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#LargPhilIssu https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#LargPhilIss...
    - circuit10 3y ago
      To me the Chinese Room thought experiment seems like it's meant to show that AIs can be intelligent, not the opposite? "Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing." Sure, but that doesn't mean the state of the program doesn't contain any understanding or intelligence, it's just that the human doesn't have a high-level view that can be used to decode that internal state. We're not asking whether the computer chip itself understands things but whether the something contained in the program running on it does. The human could also run a physics simulation as in https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ and recreate a human brain which would be no different to a physical brain in terms of behavior and so there would be no reason not to call it intelligent

cryptozeus 3y ago

Is it just me or does everyone trust AI opinions less and less ? Every time I ask it to find top 5 of something, I go and double check myself and almost always find it to be wrong. For example try searching for top 5 restaurants around me in bard. Some of them dont even exist lol and some are just random if you cross verify with actual popularity from yelp etc.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago
My trust factor for online opinion is ranked: 1) Online forums (adding 'reddit' or 'hacker news' to a search query) 2) GPT4 3) Google search
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
It's just reality sinking in.
cubefox 3y ago
Using language models for location or time based things is not recommended, as this usually requires non-textual data. Better to use them for general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. Asking them to do any complex calculations (especially when they also require non-text raw data, like inflation in a given time period) is also futile.
- CSSer 3y ago
  > general knowledge questions, programming help, translation, or writing. They get all of these wrong too. It's like some AI-specific variant of the Gell-man amnesia effect. It's usually right in the first sentence, but if you really know the answer, it's often either very debatable or completely wrong by the halfway mark of the paragraph. Meanwhile, the associated brand authority is problematic.
  - simplyluke 3y ago
    Gell-man is exactly what I’ve been referencing in conversation recently. Any professional will gladly explain why their field is really much too nuanced and complex for LLMs to threaten in the near term before seamlessly explaining how close we are to all those other engineers/doctors/clerks being automated right away.

siva7 3y ago

Opinion pieces like shopping recommendations are quite hard for current LLMs. Either it is a hard fact - or pure creative work - that's where AI shines. Anything between and things get tricky

2bitencryption 3y ago
This is one of those areas where the poor quality of the data influences the output, I think. There are so many garbage, lazily written product reviews, by websites that only exist to get people to click affiliate links. These sites only have one goal, which is to get you to click an affiliate link and make a purchase. So it is not in their best interest to say "You shouldn't buy this." Rather, they make a list of "top X Foobars", they start with a really expensive one, then they follow with a more reasonably-priced one, and give it a very positive review. It leads to clicks and purchases. Given this, it's not surprising to me that even the best LLMs carry pieces of this with them. Ask it to predict text describing some tech product on a sales page, and of course parts of that low-quality data will bleed through.
- nowooski 3y ago
  For sure. The garbage in, garbage out problem is quite real for ecommerce applications.
- cubefox 3y ago
  There is an argument to be made for automatically downweighting (be it training epochs or pagerank rating) anything with affiliate links. But I guess it would be trivial to hide them behind a redirect. That being said, I recently asked the Bing chatbot about the difference between two similar sounding printer models, and it gave a good explanation which I previously couldn't quickly find via Google. In case of Bing it is sometimes not completely clear to which degree its answer depends on the Web search, if it performed one, and to which degree it is just answering from its background knowledge (which could be prone to hallucination, but is less "gullible", so to speak). It provides sources, but not everything it says is necessarily present in the source. I'm actually surprised how quickly Bing is able to search (load and read) multiple websites, given that the loading times are not always trivial. It turns out they are much faster at reading than at typing. Indeed, each forward pass reads the entire context window, so once for every generated token!

yonatron 3y ago

Yeah. These "lies" are just artifacts of the way that LLMs work. They're meant to predict likely text given a prompt. And they do. If tasked with "write some marketing or a buying guide for product X", they will simulate likely marketing blurbs, nothing yo do with truth, that's not their wheelhouse. Predictive is a very different function, algorithm and problem-set than something like "accurately summarize existing reviews". This is a feature, not a bug. If you use something off label, you'll get off label results. MSFT should know better.

aeirjtaweraew 3y ago

Pretty soon some LLM owner is going to use the argument "Everyone is allowed to have their own opinions, and LLMs are too, their responses don't have to line up with someone else's preferences."

jarofghosts 3y ago
Alternative Intelligence

sporadicallyjoe 3y ago

Is anyone shipping AI products that DO NOT contain hallucinations? I thought that was pretty much a given.

jarofghosts 3y ago
Hallucinating is roughly how they work, we just label it as such when it's something obviously weird
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thewataccount 3y ago
  This is something I'm not sure people understand. LLM's only make a "best guess" for each next token. That's it. When it's wrong we call it a "hallucination" but really the entire thing was a "hallucination" to begin with. This is also analogous to humans - who also "hallucinate" incorrect answers, usually "hallucinate" incorrect answers less when they "Think through this step by step before giving your answer", etc.
thewataccount 3y ago
Well there isn't a human that never "hallucinates" in meaning we use for LLMs aka gives "incorrect answers" confidently. Human's brains use lots of heuristics - we don't "think step by step" through everything - instead we rapidly construct an answer for almost everything. What we say is "hallucinations" for AI in humans is "misspeaking, misremembering anything, off by 1 math/counting, missidentifying someone, using the wrong variable/method when programming, etc."

phyzome 3y ago

There is information, here, in the observations that all these "AI" demos contain blatant inaccuracies, with apparently no fact-checking having taken place. It's clear that these companies (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) do not care about accuracy, correctness, or the truth. It is not part of their business model. There is no respect for your time, your safety, your reputation. Your role as a customer is to be conned into using the products for long enough that a return on investment can be made; the companies will pivot to a new product as soon as the untrustworthiness of the old one becomes common knowledge. Short-term thinking. Desperation.

fizwhiz 3y ago

Why hasn't their stock plummeted like Google's?

predictabl3 3y ago

I'm sorry but watching people talk about the vast majority of the AI landscape is like watching people talk about FSD. Have fun on the hype treadmill.