A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.
According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said.
It’s AI. There’s nothing to delete but the erroneous response. There is no database of facts to edit. It doesn’t know fact from fiction, and the response is also very much skewed by the context of the query. I could easily get it to say the same about nearly any random name just by asking it about a bunch of family murders and then asking about a name it doesn’t recognize. It is more likely to assume that person is in the same category as the others and if the one or more of the names have any association (real or fictional) with murder.
I don’t care why. That is still libel and it is illegal for good reason. if you can’t stop this for all cases then you ai is and should be illegal.
None of the moneybags will listen, unfortunately. But I’m with you. The rollout of AI was extremely irresponsible. Just to make it profitable as quickly as possible.
Seems to me libel would require AI to have credibility, which it does not.
It’s a tool. Like most useful tools it can do harmful things. We know almost nothing about the provenance of this output. It could have been poisoned either accidentally or deliberately.
But above all, the problem is ignorant people believing the output of AI is truth. It’s pretty good at some things, but the more esoteric the knowledge, the less reliable it is. It’s best to treat AI as a storyteller. Yeah there are a lot of facts in there but when they don’t serve the story they can be embellished. I don’t see the harm in just acknowledging that and moving on.
Meanwhile, AI vendors:
“AI will soon be the only way we access information and make decisions!”
Im not a lawyer but the most conclusive missing piece of what we commonly understand to be libel is the information has to be published.
Except it’s not libel. It’s a one time string of text generated exclusively for him. Literally no one would have known what it said if the guy didn’t get the exact thing he wants “deleted” published online for everyone to see. Now it’ll be linked to his name forever, but the llm didn’t do that.
Libel requires the claims to be published or broadcasted, so it isn’t. A predictive text algorithm strung some random words together, and the guy got offended.
It’s like suing because your phone keyboard autosuggested “is a murderer” as the next words after you wrote your name.
Btw, I tried it a few times for lulz and managed to get it to write out “bluGill and the kids are going to get it on”, so I guess you can sue Google now?
I read it as they aren’t using libel as cause for their complaint but failure to comply with GDPR
I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can’t predict it, so I can’t stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It’s uncontrollable.
If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.
The severity of the impact should not dictate whether a person is accountable for a thing they own, or not.
Yeah but I can just ignore the bullets because they are nerf. And I have my own nerf guns as well.
I mean at some point any analogy fails, but AI is nothing like a gun.
They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people’s heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.
AI is a thing people choose to host and are responsible for the outcomes of its use. The internal working and limitations of the machine do not make the owners less responsible.
Yea, I’m mind blown, how, after 3 years people still don’t know how to use LLM effectively in use cases they bring value (by reducing work time)
- start a second chat and ask different to verify
- if you use chatGPT reason feature, read reasoning output as well!
- best search for verifiable thing, like code, that you can run or similar
- if you use it for research, only trust the info, if it used web search and you have read the webpages it used to summarise as well, or use traditional web search to verify based on the output
- it is great to manipulate text until sounds as desired (if you are not good in wording stuff anyway)
- plan what steps to do in a project next (like “i want to do xxx have y and need it to be z, make me a list of todos)
- and of course it is great to generate simple python scripts fast (I often use it as my python writing slave)
Using AI like this, helped me enormously in work and live Like, I learned a lot C, C++, how linux kernel modules work, how PO/POT works, helped me with translations, introduced me into music production, helped me set up appFlowy and general windows/linux issues.
Maybe the owners of LLMs need to be held responsible for the problematic software they release
So then what’s the use of the program if it uses a bunch of energy to just make shit up?
And when it hallucinates harmful things, protections need to be put onto the output.
I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can’t predict it, so I can’t stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It’s uncontrollable.
I’m sorry, as an American, I’m not seeing the problem. Don’t you just need a second gun that shoots in random directions to stop the first gun? And then a third gun to shoot the 2nd gun? I mean come on now, this is basic 3rd grade common sense!
From the GDPR’s standpoint, I wonder if it’s still personal information if it is made up bullshit. The thing is, this could have weird outcomes. Like for example, by the letter of the law, OpenAI might be liable for giving the same answer to the same query again.
then again
but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown—with the “fake information,”
The made up bullshit aside, this should be a quite clear indicator of an actual GDPR breach
Maybe he has a insta profile with the name of his kids in his bio
How would that be a GDPR breach?
Funny how everyone around laughs at free speech when it’s for humans, but when it’s a text generator, then suddenly there are some abstract principles preventing everyone to sue the living crap out of all “AI” companies, at least until they are bleeding enough to start putting disclaimers brighter than in Vegas that it’s a word salad machine that doesn’t think, know, claim, dispute, judge or reason.
They can just put in a custom regex to filter out certain things. It’ll be a bit performative since it does nothing to stop novel misinformation, but it would prevent it from saying what it’s legally required not to say.
Well, it wouldn’t really, it would say it and just hide it under a message saying it violates boundaries. It’s all a bunch of performative bullshit, actually.
For example, the things it’s required not to say would actually be perfectly fine in the realm of fiction or satire or a game of Simon says, but that’ll be disallowed, as well, because the model can’t actually tell the difference.
The fact you chose to make your data storage unreadable, doesn’t relieve you of the responsibilities inherent to storing the data.
Throwing away my car key won’t protect me from paying parking tickets i accrue while being physically unable to move my car.
It’s not unreadable, it doesn’t exist.
The responses are just statistically what sounds vaugly what you want to hear.
They can erase the chat responses, but that won’t stop it from generating it again.
Generative AI doesn’t start with facts and work from there. It’s just statistically what you want to hear.
It’s not unreadable, it doesn’t exist.
Then what do you mean trained AI models are?
The ai model is trained on data and encodes unknown parts of that data in its weights.
This is data storage. Unmanageable, almost unknowable data storage, but still data storage.
If it didn’t store data it couldn’t learn from its training.
Plot twist: “Dad” isn’t even his real name.
Sorry, I’ve spent months telling chatgpt that Arve Hjalmar Holmen killed his kids for a school project.
It’s all hallucinations.
Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.
It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.
It really is sad. I often hear, “I even asked ChatGPT and it said…” as if that means their response is valid. I’ve heard people say it who I thought would know better, too.
The number of times I’ve heard that by people expecting it to win them arguments is incredibly discouraging.
Infuriating. It’s like an oracle. Except in late antique literature you can see that nobody that firmly believed in what oracles say (that’d be disciples making notes according to some procedure kept secret, probably involving mind-affecting substances, but also mathematics - you can already see how this is similar to LLMs), it was like visiting a known attraction, interesting - wow, I’ve been at the Delphi oracle, I’ve received an advice there.
And today those herds of unbelievable fools are less sane that that antique public.
few realize how they work and what they do.
Seriously, you have no idea. I have spent some time delving into the current models, human psychology, neurology and evolution and how people engage with each other or other entities, and the problem is already worse than we realize, and it’s going to get so, so much worse, because our species has major vulnerabilities in our entire conscious experience, these things are going to reshape the way people engage with reality itself at some point and we should all be a lot more concerned and I’m an old man yelling on the street corner with a cardboard sign huh.
yeah it’s sick. it’s not AI, but it will destroy the world. I kinda think that’s the point of it.
State propaganda works by gaslighting you to think everyone around thinks some way, or at least a select set of people, and that you should adjust your behavior accordingly. It’s more complicated, some people are conformists, some are contrarians, but it works, there’s their own kind of working trap for everyone.
But it still has efficiency that can be improved.
With LLMs all your interactions are by default through such influence. They are averaging the bullshit, and information produced by them is fed to us all. That’s the opposite of what any talented or just useful person does, useful people try to increase the entropy, LLMs kill it.
It’s a dream of thieves, bullies, useless people, politicians, that kind of crap.
Basically “Us”, “1984” and whatever else has been written is being attempted via this tool. It’s not misdirected I think, but I also think it’ll fail, because evolution works in shorter feedback loops and those doing such things succeed in them, but fail in other directions which could use energy.
OK, I should stop writing such texts, they repeat, don’t help with migraines, they are obvious and probably wrong.
to clarify: shannon entropy not thermodynamic entropy, which is kind of the opposite?
i hate language sometimes.
I think it will succeed at buying them time to build their doom bunkers without us doing a revolution, and then retreat into them.
they’ll die in there. closed systems don’t work and these people cannot cope with, much less manage, ecology, but we’ll die first. no shortcuts for those lazy good-for-nothing assholes who would rather just skip over the part where the living envy the dead and maybe miss out on human extinction. can’t half ass these things.
It doesn’t matter how it works. Is the output acceptable?
Sounds like no, and it’s the company’s problem to fix it
Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.
Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).
We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probability that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.
Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.
Surely 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 if it gets far enough.
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.
Could we move away from calling it hallucinations as that would imply thinking? We should call it for what it is - bullshit.
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.
Are we sure that someone else with that name hasn’t committed those crimes? After all if I search my name it says I’m an astronaut, because there is an actual NASA astronaut with my name. It’s not saying I’m that person, it’s just saying that that name is the same as that person’s.
