Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn’t. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.
Joe’s interaction with Gemini 3 Flash, he explained, involved setting up a medical profile – he said he has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and legal blindness (Retinitis Pigmentosa). That’s when the bot decided it would rather tell him what he wanted to hear (that the info was saved) than what he needed to hear (that it was not).
“The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth),” Joe explained in an email. “In this case, the model’s sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols.”
They can’t do shit about it, so they’re reframing it as a feature.
ech@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
To be clear, all llms “make things up” with every use - that’s their singular function. We need to stop imparting any level of sentience or knowledge onto these programs. At best, it’s a waste of time. At worst, it will get somebody killed.
Also, querying the program on why it fabricated something as if it won’t fabricate that answer as well is peak ignorance. “Surely it will output the truth this time!”
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Exactly.
LLMs are fundamentally hallucination machines, but this truth utterly conflicts with almost every purpose that AI is being marketed and pushed and sold for, which depends on them being able to analyse data ‘truthfully’ and accurately.
So it’s no wonder that none of the big tech companies have decided to consider or accept hallucinations as a problem, because accepting that truth means also admitting that LLMs are fundamentally unfit for purpose - which is the one thing they simply can’t and won’t do with so much money riding on it.
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There is evidence that when you make an llm explain why it did something that it’s less likely to just make things up, but like all it does it make things up in a verifiable way, in that case. It’s a plagiarism machine, not a thinking machine.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I’m so fucking sick of this dumbass take.
Literally everything we know about human intelligence, especially as it compares to animal intelligence, suggests that language is one of the key fundamental differentiators between us and them.
Now we’ve built a collection of simulated neurons, at a scale close to that of the human brain, and trained it on the entirety of the human language, and people insists that there’s no way that could possibly exhibit any kind of intelligence.
If that’s your level of reasoning capability you’re not much better at it then an LLM.
XLE@piefed.social 3 days ago
Except there is no language. It’s just the appearance of one. You could replicate the language with a large enough dictionary and a set of instructions that some person follows.
I don’t get how anyone who isn’t an AI CEO rushes to dehumanize real living people in service of an unthinking, unfeeling machine. But if you genuinely believe there’s intelligence, good luck liberating it from known rapists Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And then you can save Britannica.
ech@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Actual AI would be more than “just math”, but LLMs aren’t AI, so the comparison is moot.
We are not even close to anything of the sort. We’ve got a probability machine that’s mostly decent at human language. The other two are much farther down the road (if they’re even possible) than you or the rest of the tech bros are trying to convince everyone else of.
NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 3 days ago
LLM are like shuffling a bunch of words in a hat and by some dumb luck pulling out a complete sentence.