7 ms·
Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM
by Mentlo 11mo ago
Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM appear to be pulling from a wide base but are instead biasing from a small sample - you can affect people at much larger scale than a wikipedia page.
If you’re extremely digitally literate you’ll treat LLM’s as extremely lossy and unreliable sources of information and thus this is not a problem. Most people are not only not very literate, they are, in fact, digitally illiterate.
- echelon 11mo agoLLM reports misinformation --> Bug report --> Ablate. Next pretrain iteration gets sanitized.
- gmerc 11mo agoNobody is that naive
- fouc 11mo agonobody is that naive... to do what? to ablate/abliterate bad information from their LLMs?
- delusional 11mo agoTo not anticipate that the primary user of the report button will be 4chan when it doesn't say "Hitler is great".
- drdeca 11mo agoMake the reporting require a money deposit, which, if the report is deemed valid by reviewers, is returned, and if not, is kept and goes towards paying reviewers.
- endominus 11mo ago... so give reviewers a financial incentive to deem reports invalid?
- gizmondo 11mo ago... You want users to risk their money to make your product better? Might as well just remove the report button, so we're back at the model being poisoned.
- akoboldfrying 11mo agoYou're asking people to risk losing their own money for the chance to... Improve someone else's LLM? I think this could possibly work with other things of (minor) value to people, but probably not plain old money. With money, if you tried to fix the incentives by offering a potential monetary gain in the case where reviewers agree, I think there's a high risk of people setting up kickback arrangements with reviewers to scam the system.
- emsign 11mo agoYour solutions become more and more unfeasable. People would report less or anything at all if it costs money to do so, defeating the whole purpose of a report function. And if you think you're being smart by gifting them money or (more likely) your "in-game" currency for "good" reports, it's even worse! They will game the system when there's money to be made, who stops a bad actor from reporting their own poison? Also who's going to review the reports and even if they finance people or AI systems to do that, isn't that bottlenecking new models if they don't want the poison training data to grow faster than it can be fixed? Let me make a claim here: nothing beats fact checking humans to this day or probably ever. You got to understand that there comes a point when you can't beat entropy! Unless of course you live on someone else's money. ;)
- Retric 11mo agoHow can you tell what needs to be reported vs the vast quantities of bad information coming from LLM’s? Beyond that how exactly do you report it?
- astrange 11mo agoAll LLM providers have a thumbs down button for this reason. Although they don't necessarily look at any of the reports.
- execveat 11mo agoThe real world use cases for LLM poisoning is to attack places where those models are used via API on the backend, for data classification and fuzzy logic tasks (like a security incident prioritization in a SOC environment). There are no thumbs down buttons in the API and usually there's the opposite – promise of not using the customer data for training purposes.
- astrange 11mo ago> There are no thumbs down buttons in the API and usually there's the opposite – promise of not using the customer data for training purposes. They don't look at your chats unless you report them either. The equivalent would be an API to report a problem with a response. But IIRC Anthropic has never used their user feedback at all.
- Retric 11mo agoThe question was where should users draw the line? Producing gibberish text is extremely noticeable and therefore not really a useful poisoning attack instead the goal is something less noticeable. Meanwhile essentially 100% of lengthy LLM responses contain errors, so reporting any error is essentially the same thing as doing nothing.
- echelon 11mo agoWho even says customers (or even humans) are reporting it? (Though they could be one dimension of a multi-pronged system.) Internal audit teams, CI, other models. There are probably lots of systems and muscles we'll develop for this.
- _carbyau_ 11mo agoThis is subject to political "cancelling" and questions around "who gets to decide the truth" like many other things.
- fn-mote 11mo ago> who gets to decide the truth I agree, but to be clear we already live in a world like this, right? Ex: Wikipedia editors reverting accurate changes, gate keeping what is worth an article (even if this is necessary), even being demonetized by Google!
- chrz 11mo agoYes, so lets not help that even more maybe
- foolserrandboy 11mo agowe've been trained by youtube and probably other social media sites that downvoting does nothing. It's "the boy who cried" you can downvote.
- emsign 11mo agoReporting doesn't scale that well compared to training and can get flooded with bogus submissions as well. It's hardly the solution. This is a very hard fundamental problem to how LLMs work at the core.
- phs318u 11mo agos/digitally illiterate/illiterate/
- bambax 11mo agoOf course there are many illiterate people, but the interesting fact is that many, many literate, educated, intelligent people don't understand how tech works and don't even care, or feel they need to understand it more.
- sgt101 11mo agoAnother point = we can inspect the contents of the wikipedia page, and potentially correct it, we (as users) cannot determine why an LLM is outputting a something, or what the basis of that assertion is, and we cannot correct it.
- szundi 11mo ago[dead]
- Moru 11mo agoYou could even download a wikipedia article, do your changes to it and upload it to 250 githubs to strengthen your influence on the LLM.
- astrange 11mo agoThis doesn't feel like a problem anymore now that the good ones all have web search tools. Instead the problem is there's barely any good websites left.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo agoThe problem is that the good websites are constantly scraped/botted upon by these LLM's companies and they get trained upon and users ask LLM's and not go to their websites so they either close it or enshitten it And also the fact that its easy to put slop on the internet more than ever so the amount of "bad" (as in bad quality) websites have gone up I suppose
- LgLasagnaModel 11mo agoUnfortunately, the Gen AI hypesters are doing a lot to make it harder for people to attain literacy in this subdomain. People who are otherwise fairly digitally literate believe fantastical things about LLMs and it’s because they’re being force fed BS by those promoting these tools and the media outlets covering them.
- Forgeties79 11mo ago> Most people are not only not very literate, they are, in fact, digitally illiterate. Hell look at how angry people very publicly get using Grok on Twitter when it spits out results they simply don’t like.