[schiffern]

"Meta AI claims"

No it doesn't. It can't. Only people (or companies, which require people) can meaningfully "claim" things. LLMs are still not people, despite our persistent attempts to personify them.

This is merely a sexier headline than "Hallucination machine hallucinates." And even that word personifies a bit too much!

[nicklecompte]

I understand your point but I think it's misplaced here. This kind of criticism made sense with the Bing/Sydney stuff, since "Bing claims to be self-aware" is misleading compared to "Bing inconsistently recites some sci-fi cliches." People like Kevin Roose were actively spreading misconceptions about how LLMs work. It would have been nice if they had taken your comment seriously in 2023.

But this is different. The subtext of the headline is clearly "Facebook's dumb chatbot had a very dumb glitch." I believe laypeople would immediately understand the AI is just plagiarizing a Facebook mom. Policing the language here seems more about pedantry than correcting actual misconceptions.

(You might say that some people would read this headline and jump to a Her fantasy, where Meta's poor AI is desperate for human connection or whatever. But these people are not going to be swayed by technical accuracy. They will just interpret language like yours as euphemism and denial.)

[schiffern]

> Policing the language here seems more about pedantry than correcting actual misconceptions.

Feel free to blame me, if it helps. I've got broad shoulders.

However the fact that we're (collectively) losing the mass "mindshare battle" doesn't imply bad faith. Some of us are still fighting the good fight, and I don't see a problem with that.

Personally I think this only means we should fight harder against these dangerous beliefs, not throw in the towel (or worse, friendly fire against fellow educators).

And yes, it's human-side beliefs that are dangerous, not the tech itself. If an LLM "suggests" to kill <group of people> and we know what an LLM really is, then it's harmless. However if a large fraction believe an LLM is some infallible AI oracle or genie (a surprisingly common belief), then this "suggestion" could cause catastrophic harm.

[tiptup300]

Any more information on this?

I heard so much about the Kevin Roose stuff, is there a breakdown somewhere of what actually happened.

From the way that podcast presented it, Microsoft had the bing bot untethered in a way that it kepted taking in more and more context and was just taking it correctly.

This is against my current much less virgin, but very much simple, understanding of how llms/gpt works.

What actually happened there?

[swatcoder]

You're right in a purist sense, but the alternative headline would be "Meta is already carelessly allowing hallucination machine to hallucinate in troubling places and with troubling amplification by their content placement algorithm"

It's definitely a vivid example of Meta being irresponsible with the tech today and of what we can expect a lot of the internet to be polluted with in the future.

[davekeck]

What verbiage would you deem acceptable, if "claims" and "hallucinates" are both out?

[tpmoney]

“Weighted random text generator generates random text that doesn’t make logical sense” maybe. Seems to be both accurate and better describes what’s actually going on. The AI can’t claim or hallucinate anything because that requires it to have core beliefs and senses that can be fooled by incorrect inputs.

[schiffern]

It's right in the most famous system's name: "Generative Pre-trained Transformer". LLMs generate text (and other media) which imitates their pre-training corpus. That's all.

At the end of the day, it's turning a mathematical crank. LLMs have no more intentionality than a jack-in-the-box.