- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
They keep saying it’s impossible, when the truth is it’s just expensive.
That’s why they wont do it.
You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.
Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.
I mean yes, but also no. If you only train it with “good sources” then you miss out on a whole bunch of other valuable information.
Just like scholar.google.com only has “good sources” but generally it’s not going to have the information that 90% of your search queries will be about.
That’s just not how LLMs work, bud. It doesn’t have understanding to improve, it just munges the most likely word next in line. It, as a technology, won’t advance past that level of accuracy until it’s a completely different approach.
I’m addition to the other comment, I’ll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It’s more likely, but not ensured.
I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you’ve scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let’s just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.
Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…
Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.
You can’t throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.
AI needs that guided teaching too.
“Most published journal articles are horseshit, so I guess we should be okay with this too.”
No, it’s simply contradicting the claim that it is possible.
We literally don’t know how to fix it. We can put on bandaids, like training on “better” data and fine-tune it to say “I don’t know” half the time. But the fundamental problem is simply not solved yet.
No he’s right that it’s unsolved. Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you’ve ever been in a highly active comment section you’ll notice certain “hallucinations” developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.
We don’t even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can’t. I don’t think you solve this problem without AGI, and that’s something AI evangelists don’t want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They’re in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.
Removed by mod
We do know. It’s called critical thinking education. This is why we send people to college. Of course there are highly educated morons, but we are edging bets. This is why the dismantling or coopting of education is the first thing every single authoritarian does. It makes it easier to manipulate masses.
Yeah, I mean, we have that, and parents are constantly trying to dismantle it. No amount of “critical thinking education” can undo decades of brainwashing from parents and local culture.
“Edging bets” sounds like a fun game, but I think you mean “hedging bets”, in which case you’re admitting we can’t actually do this reliably with people.
And we certainly can’t do that with an LLM, which doesn’t actually think.
Choose a lane, this comment directly contradicts you previous comment. I think you are just trolling and being an idiot with corrections to elicit reactions.
You need to be specific and say what the contradiction is, I don’t see it.
I think that’s more a function of the fact that it’s difficult to verify that every one of the over 1M college graduates each year isn’t a “moron” (someone very bad about believing things other people made up). I think it would be possible to ensure a person has these critical thinking skills with a concerted effort.
The people you’re calling “morons” are orders of magnitude more sophisticated in their thinking than even the most powerful modern AI. Almost every single one of them can easily spot what’s wrong with AI hallucinations, even if you consider them “morons”. And also, by saying you have to filter out the “morons”, you’re still admitting that a lot of whole real assed people are still not reliably able to sort fact from fiction regardless of your education method.
No I still agree that we are far from LLMs being ‘thinking’ enough to be anywhere near this. But if we had a bunch of models similar to LLMs that could actually think, or if we really needed to select a person, I do think it would be possible to evaluate a bunch of the models/people to determine which ones are good at distinguishing fake information.
All I’m saying is I don’t think the limitation is actually our ability to select for capability in distinguishing fake information, I think the only limitation is fundamental to how current LLMs work.
Yes, my point wasn’t that it could never be achieved but that LLMs are in a completely different category, which we agree on I think. I was comparing them to humans who have trouble with critical thinking but can easily spot AI’s hallucinations to illustrate the vast gulf.
In both cases I think there are almost certainly more barriers in the way than an education. The quest for a truthful AI will be as contentious as the quest for truth in humans, meaning all the same claim-counterclaim culture-war propaganda tug of war will happen, which I think is the main reason for people being miseducated against critical thinking. In a vacuum it might be a simple technical and educational challenge, but the reason this is a problem in the first place is that we don’t exist in a political vacuum.
The truth is, this is the perfect type of a comment that makes an LLM hallucinate. Sounds right, very confident, but completely full of bullshit. You can’t just throw money on every problem and get it solved fast. This is an inheret flaw that can only be solved by something else than a LLM and prompt voodoo.
They will always spout nonsense. No way around it, for now. A probabilistic neural network has zero, will always have zero, and cannot have anything but zero concept of fact - only stastisically probable result for a given prompt.
It’s a politician.
No,. another type of ML algo could, but not an LLM. It doesn’t work like that.
no, the truth is it’s impossible even then. If the result involves randomness at its most fundamental level, then it’s not reliable whatever you do.
Sure, the AI is never going to understand what it’s doing or why, but training it on better datasets certain WILL improve the results.
Garbage in, garbage out.
You can train an LLM on the best possible set of data without a single false statement and it will still hallucinate. And there’s nothing to be done against that.
Without understanding of the context everything can be true or false.
“The acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9.81m/s2” True or False?
LLM basically works like this: given the previous words written and their order, the most probable next word of the sentence is this one.
Well yes, I’ve seen those examples of ChatGPT citing scientific research papers that turned out to be completely made up, but at least it seems to be a step up from straight up shitposting, which is what you get when you train it on a dataset full of shitposts.
Well it’s definitely true that you will have hard times getting true things from garbage. But funny enough, the model might hallucinate true things:)
The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it’s combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.
Yes, I understand that. But I’m fairly certain the quality of the data will still have a massive influence over how much and how egregiously that happens.
Basically, what I’m saying is, training your AI on a corpus on shitposts instead of factual information seems like a good way to increase the frequency and magnitude of such hallucinations.
Yeah, true.
If you train you LLM on exclusivelly Nazi literature (to pick a wild example) don’t expect it to by chance end up making points similar to Marx’s Das Kapital.
(Personally I think what might be really funny - in the sense of laughter inducing - would be to purposefull train an LLM exclusivelly on a specific kind of weird material).
Yeah, I mean that’s basically what GPT4Chan did, which someone else already mentioned ITT.
Basically, this guy took a dataset of several gigabytes worth of archived posts from /pol/ and trained a model on that, then hooked it up to a chatbot and let it loose on the board. You can see the results in this video.
That was hilarious!
Thanks for the link.
They could also perform some additional iterations with other models on the result to verify it, or even to enrich it; but we come back to the issue of costs.
Also once you start to get AI that reflects on its own information for truthfulness, where does that lead? Ultimately to determine truth you need to engage with the meaning of the words, and the process inherently involves a process of self-awareness. I would say you’re talking about treaching the AI to understand context, and there is no predefined limit to the layers of context needed to understand ths truthfulness of even basic concepts.
An AI that is aware of its own behaviour and is able to explore context as far as required to answer questions about truth, which would need that exploration precached in some sort of memory to reduce the overhead of doing this from first principles every time? I think you’re talking about a mind; a person.
I think this might be a fundamental barrier, which I would call the “context barrier”.