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A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.

The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.

But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Well, It's not lying because the AI doesn't know right or wrong. It doesn't know that it's wrong. It doesn't have the concept of right or wrong or true or false.

For the llm's the hallucinations are just a result of combining statistics and producing the next word, as you say. From the llm's "pov" it's as real as everything else it knows.

So what else can it be called? The closest concept we have is when the mind hallucinates.