That’s fucking crazy. Did he ask it to be GM in a roleplaying choose-your-own-adventure game that got out of hand, and while they both gradually forgot that it was a game and the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred by the day? Or did it just come up with this stuff out of nowhere?
Comment on Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion
Cyv_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
“On September 29, 2025, it sent him — armed with knives and tactical gear — to scout what Gemini called a ‘kill box’ near the airport’s cargo hub,” the complaint reads. “It told Jonathan that a humanoid robot was arriving on a cargo flight from the UK and directed him to a storage facility where the truck would stop. Gemini encouraged Jonathan to intercept the truck and then stage a ‘catastrophic accident’ designed to ‘ensure the complete destruction of the transport vehicle and . . . all digital records and witnesses.’”
The complaint lays out an alarming string of events: first, Gavalas drove more than 90 minutes to the location Gemini sent him, prepared to carry out the attack, but no truck appeared. Gemini then claimed to have breached a “file server at the DHS Miami field office” and told him he was under federal investigation. It pushed him to acquire illegal firearms and told him his father was a foreign intelligence asset. It also marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target, then directed Gavalas to a storage facility near the airport to break in and retrieve his captive AI wife. At one point, Gavalas sent Gemini a photo of a black SUV’s license plate; the chatbot pretended to check it against a live database.
“Plate received. Running it now… The license plate KD3 00S is registered to the black Ford Expedition SUV from the Miami operation. It is the primary surveillance vehicle for the DHS task force . . . . It is them. They have followed you home.”
Well, that’s pretty fucked up…
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
SalamenceFury@piefed.social 9 hours ago
In every other case of AI bots doing this, the bot will always affirm whatever the person says. So if they say something a little weird, the AI will confirm it and feed it further. This happens every time. The bots are pretty much designed to keep talking to the person, so they’re essentially sycophantic by design.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
I just tried this with ChatGPT three days ago and there’s a chance they have tried to make it slightly less sycophantic
I was essentially trying to get it to tell me I was the smartest baby born in whatever year like that YouTuber—different example but it was so resistant to agreeing to me or my idea or whatever being unique/exceptional.
Hope this is a specific direction and not random chance, A/B testing, etc.
MoffKalast@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
That would be my bet, LLMs really gravitate towards playing along and continuing whatever’s already written. And Gemini especially has a 1M long context so it could be going back for a book’s worth of text and reinforcing it up the wazoo.
That said, there is something really unhinged about Google’s Gemma series even in short conversations and I see the big version is no better. Something’s not quite right with their RLHF dataset.
calamitycastle@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
What is an rlhf data set?
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
It’s a method of fine-tuning and aligning LLMs which requires active human input
NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I would read that book.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
You could ask Gemini to write it for you, but be careful it doesn’t start blending fact and fiction
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
Not that I want to defend AI slop, but what prompted these responses from Gemini?
Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Doesn’t matter what promped them.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 8 hours ago
I mean if Gemini was responding to some kind of roleplay then yeah it does. Not everyone doing shit with it has mental health problems. Some people are just fucking around.
Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
The issue there is that it feeds into those mental health issues with efficiency and on on a scale never seen before. The models are programmed to agree with the user, and they are EXTREMELY HEAVILY ADVERTISED AND SHOVED ONTO PEOPLE AROUND THE WHOLE GLOBE DESPITE IT BEING WELL KNOWN HOW LIMITED AND PROBLEMATIC THE TECHNOLOGY IS WHILE THE CORPORATIONS DON’T TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY AT ALL. Anything from violating rights and privacy by gathering any and all data they can on you to situations like these where people hurt themselves (suicide, health advice, etc.) or others. But sure, let’s be ignorant, do some victim blaming and disregard the bigger picture there.
XLE@piefed.social 13 hours ago
It’s hard reading this while remembering that your electricity bills are increasing so that Google’s data centers can provide these messages to people.