Comment on Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better
Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 week ago
It’s a Large Language Model designed to generate natural-sounding language based on statistical probabilities and patterns - not knowledge or understanding. It doesn’t “lie” and it doesn’t have the capability to explain itself. It just talks.
That speech being coherent is by design; the accuracy of the content is not.
This isn’t the model failing. It’s just being used for something it was never intended for.
THB@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I puke a little in my mouth every time an article humanizes LLMs, even if they’re critical. Exactly as you said they do not “lie” nor are they “trying” to do anything. It’s literally word salad that organized to look like language.
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think humanizing them is a fairly trivial thing, in this sort of context.
Yes, it’s true, it didn’t “lie” about health.
But it has the same result as someone lying, it’s another bulletpoint in the list of reasons not to trust AI, even if it pulls from the right sources and presents information generally correctly, it may in fact just not present information it could have presented because the sources it learned from have done so in a way that would get those sources deemed “liars”.
Could write that out every time, I suppose, but people will say their dog is trying to trick them when he goes to the bowl 5 minutes after dinner, or goes to their partner for the same, and everyone understands the dog isn’t actually attempting to deceive them, and just wants more.
Same thing, to me at least. It lied, but in a similar way to how my dog lies, not in the way a human can lie.