AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

by isaacfrond • 3 years ago

24 21 3 years ago

philistine• 3 years ago

Language is power. Using the word hallucinate to describe what is happening when language models invent facts is inappropriate.

They lie.

scrollaway• 3 years ago

Lying requires intent and knowledge.

DoItToMe81• 3 years ago

And hallucination requires consciousness and sentience. There really needs to be better terminology for this.

burnished3• 3 years ago

That seems overly emotional, to lie requires intent right? It implies the will to deceive. We don't accuse people of deception when they are simply wrong after all, so it feels inappropriate to accuse a machine that is predicting the next most likely word of lieing.

13years• 3 years ago

There is actually some basis in concept. Emergent deception ...

https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/emergent-deception-optimizat...

dweinberger• 3 years ago

Yes. Lying requires being able to discern truth from falsity. But LLMs don't know what's true even when they say true things. That's why "hallucinate" is a better word ... better but not perfect because for an LLM it's all hallucinations all the time. Some of those hallucinations (most of them) happen to turn out to be true.

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

They neither lie nor hallucinate. They get it wrong. It's a fail.

Is the guy who adds an edit whilst citing a seemingly credible source also a liar? No, they're wrong.

Intent is everything. AI does not have intent. Don't feed the animals, don't personify the LLM.

memen• 3 years ago

Well, in some cases, negligence is sufficient for a lie or deception. E.g. forgetting to properly cite results is plagiarism, whether you intended to lie or not. Maybe it makes sense to hold the owner of the hardware that produces these <hallucinations/lies/failures/deceptions/confabulations> accountable for it. In many places with freedom of speech, this will be difficult probably.

petemir• 3 years ago

Words can take new meanings when they are used in other, sometimes technical, contexts.

jl2718• 3 years ago

I think this is more accurate for non-emotional reasons. The GPT models have actually been trained to lie in the sense that they will tell you something convincing not just about the topic, but also how they are getting the information, e.g. “I checked my sources and found…”. You can also see jailbreaks where it has been trained to reverse belief on sensitive topics. This is consistently deceptive bias rather than random variance.

Imagine if Apple had a generative image model that produces fake metadata and watermarks showing the data cam from a real iPhone, and then signs it with their key. That would show obvious intent to deceive rather than attempt to accurately represent reality.

chpatrick• 3 years ago

I think "they bullshit" is a better way to put it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

burnished3• 3 years ago

I think Bruckman has the right of it. Wikipedia already has to deal with a lot of automated and subtle vandalism, I don't think the relative cheapness of contextually sensible text from chatGPT represents the same kind of game changer that it may for other sites.

remram• 3 years ago

During a recent community call, it became apparent that there is a community split

This really seems like bothsidesism. Reading the notes, Wikipedia is not nearly as split on the subject as Vice makes it appear.

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

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