Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids

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.

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.

I read it as they aren't using libel as cause for their complaint but failure to comply with GDPR

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.

If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.

Maybe people need to learn that AI hallucinates

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

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.

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.

Don’t use hallucinate to describe what it is doing, that is humanizing it and making the tech seem more advanced than it is. It is randomly mashing words together without understanding the meaning of any of them

The number of times I've heard that by people expecting it to win them arguments is incredibly discouraging.

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.

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.

Humans hallucinate. These things extrapolate tokens statistically. In average his tone of requests would be likely to lead to some murder story.

Nothing is wrong with the tech (except it doesn't seem very useful when you firmly know what it can't do), but everything is wrong with that tech being called artificial intelligence.

It's almost like calling polygraph "lies detector".

Well, one of is features is remembering details you told it previously. I am surprised it went into child murder territory. In my experience it will usually avoid such topics unless prompted carefully. My initial suspicion is he prompted it into saying these things, but to be fair these things have gone off the rails before. Either way, most people just have a very little or no understanding on what these things are and how they work.

It's a function approximate...er!