this is confusing. did you think I meant you’re engaging in libel against llms or something? that’s the only way I can make sense of your reply.
Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca 5 weeks agoSurely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).
But great can come out of this case.
Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.
But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.
TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).
Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.
pyre@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Really? I read your reply as saying the output is libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based in fact.
pyre@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
all I’m getting is that you’re saying it’s full of shit as a defense against libel.
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.
But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.
You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.
If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.
My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.
That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).
Natanael@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
Technically, in some jurisdictions a person who is widely known to be unreliable is harder to sue for libel precisely because the likelihood of reputational injury is lower if nobody actually believes the claim.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Could we move away from calling it hallucinations as that would imply thinking? We should call it for what it is - bullshit.
eleitl@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Confabulation is a more appropriate term.