I’m failing to see how this is different from making up a fact and then spreading it to news outlets. If you are the authority, and you say something is true, you don’t get to point and laugh when people believe your lies. That’s a serious breach of ethics and morals. Feeding false information to an LLM is no different that a magazine. It only regurgitates what’s been said. It isn’t going to suddenly start doing science on it’s own to determine if what you’ve said is true or not. That isn’t it’s job. It’s job is to tell you what color the sky is based on what you told it the color of the sky was.
Bixonimania, a rare hyperpigmentation disorder, presents a diagnostic challenge due to its unique presentation and its fictional nature
and
This study was fully funded by Austeria Horizon University, in particular the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad with the funding number…
as well as
Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group
Any human actively reading those studies would notice something off.
Besides, the author didn’t feed it to the AI himself, he just published the study as a preprint, not even officially. Everything after that was done by the crawlers. This specific study was an experiment to see how far these crawlers go and if anything gets reviewed, but it could just as well have been a satirical paper published on April 1st and the crawlers would still see it as truth.
This should be top comment, the researchers did such a good job to make sure anyone with even the slightest reading comprehension would realise this is parody.
Regardless of that, the internet has always been full of lies and we cannot expect bad actors to not exploit this.
That’s a serious breach of ethics and morals. Feeding false information to an LLM is no different that a magazine.
Hang on. Are you suggesting its unethical/immoral to lie to a machine?
Additionally, the authors didn’t submit the article to a magazine as factual. They posted the articles on a preprint server which can be very questionable anyway as there is no peer review. The machine chose to ignore rigor and treat them as fact.
Additionally, the parents didn’t place the cake on an actual plate. They placed the cake on a napkin which can be very questionable anyway as there is no solid foundation for the cake. The child chose to ignore the napkin and treat the cake as food.
I really don’t understand why people think that LLMs are GOFAI. They aren’t making the hard choices. They aren’t giving novel solutions to the energy crisis. They aren’t solving the trolley problem. They are shitting out what you feed them. If you feed them garbage, you get garbage in return. No one is surprised when the dog gets worms after eating poop it found in the yard. Why are we shocked that an AI that doesn’t know fact from fiction treats everything the same?
It’s known that AI companies will harvest content without care for its veracity and train LLMs on it. These LLMs will then regurgitate that content as fact.
This isn’t a particularly novel finding but the experiment illustrates it rather well.
The researchers you consider to have acted so immorally did add useless information to the knowledge pool – but it was unadvertised, immediately recognizable useless information that any sane reviewer would’ve flagged. They included subtle clues like thanking someone at Starfleet Academy for letting them use a lab aboard the USS Enterprise. They claimed to have gotten funding from the Sideshow Bob Foundation. Subtle.
By providing this easily traceable nonsense, they were able to turn the generally-but-informally known understanding that LLMs will repeat bullshit into a hard scientific data point that others can build on. Nothing world-changing but still valuable. They basically did what Alan Sokal did.
Instead of worrying about this experiment you should worry about all the misinformation in LLMs that wasn’t provided (and diligently documented) by well-meaning researchers.
No one is surprised when the dog gets worms after eating poop it found in the yard. Why are we shocked that an AI that doesn’t know fact from fiction treats everything the same?
I think that’s the problem though, I think the poop in the yard is a better example. Key is the researchers put that information in speculation. That’s like if Anderson Cooper made up a fake news story, and posted it in an anonymous tweet to analyze how far it would spread, and then fox news picks it up and runs with the story all day.
That’s the key problem, people are trusting LLMs to do their research for them, when LLMs just gather all the information they can get their hands on mindlessly.
That’s the key problem, If they send a misinformative article, to a place for untested, unproven random speculation with a very low bar for who can submit… they can determine that LLMs are looking there. Key thing to note is, it’s not their fake disease that’s the threat. It’s that if it found their fake article, then LLMs probably also scooped up a ton of other misinformed or dubious things.
Lets look at it this way, say it was a cake, but we threw it in the garbage, 2 weeks later we find the same cake… at jims bakery, same ID, same distinct marker we put on it.
What does that tell us, it tells us that Jims bakery is clearly sometimes, dumpster diving and putting things up that clearly are dangerous.
That isn’t a fault in the LLM, though, that is a fault in the general make-up of human skepticism, or lack their of. We didn’t invent the word ‘Propaganda’ without having a sentence to use it in. Those that don’t practice skepticism, critical thinking, and even mild reasoning are the ones that will get led astray. That didn’t just start happening when LLMs came around, it’s been here since we first started talking to each other. It’s only more visible now because everything is more visible now. The world is much more connected than it ever has been, and that grows with every literal day. All these fucking idiots that don’t double check what they are being told are the problem, regardless of if it came from an LLM or a human, because I guarantee you they are being led astray by both. They don’t trust the machine because it’s a machine, they trust what they are told because they are lazy. That isn’t the LLMs fault.
I mean it’s a problem in the marketing and common usage of LLMs. That’s exactly it though, LLM companies, and people are describing LLMs as a way to do research.
IE you could say these criticisms come in things like wikipedia too. IE anyone can write what they want, but what does wikipedia require? right every single claim has to be cited. So if you go to wikipedia find misinformation, you click on the number and see it.
If you ask chatgpt What diseases should I be concerned about in africa, it lists you a few. You can then… google it, find the wikipedia page, and look for what’s there. It’s a tool without a purpose at that point. because it literally doesn’t save you any steps. It doesn’t guide you to the source to check it’s facts, when it tells you them it may or may not be making up the sources. At which point, it has no factual use, or use in even directing to the facts.
Seems like the logical conclusion would be then that people who train LLMs should be responsible for curating the data, not expecting that the data will just be sound. People have been lying on the internet since it was invented, the advent of LLMs isn’t suddenly going to create an internet that doesn’t occur in.
And people have been launching products without thought to the ramifications since the dawn of time. I don’t think that will change, either. What we need to do is educate ourselves better when it comes to identifying potential fraud. Taking anything at face value, regardless of it’s source, is dumb. If it’s worth knowing, it’s worth verifying.
They are shitting out what you feed them. If you feed them garbage, you get garbage in return.
This is the missing conceptual understanding that probably 90% of LLM users lack. They really don’t know how LLMs work, and treat them like AGI. Sadly this includes adult policy makers in our society too. Efforts like those of these these researchers act to educate the public. I’m hopeful this will spark some critical thinking on the part of regular, otherwise ignorant, LLM users.
“Liable” means they might post a correction later that nobody will see because corrections aren’t sexy to algorithms. Big deal. LLM vendors are liable in practically the same way.
Corrections are the piece that the public sees, but liability has more to do with being able to prove in court that you took reasonable steps to make sure you were providing accurate information.
This is about the untraceability of AI slop and the tendency of people to blindly believe stuff that LLMs put out. These news outlets just publish LLM outputs as facts without checking sources. Anyone could poison these LLMs so this is more of a threat model demonstration.
I’m failing to see how this is different from making up a fact and then spreading it to news outlets. If you are the authority, and you say something is true, you don’t get to point and laugh when people believe your lies. That’s a serious breach of ethics and morals. Feeding false information to an LLM is no different that a magazine. It only regurgitates what’s been said. It isn’t going to suddenly start doing science on it’s own to determine if what you’ve said is true or not. That isn’t it’s job. It’s job is to tell you what color the sky is based on what you told it the color of the sky was.
The studies contain parts like
and
as well as
Any human actively reading those studies would notice something off.
Besides, the author didn’t feed it to the AI himself, he just published the study as a preprint, not even officially. Everything after that was done by the crawlers. This specific study was an experiment to see how far these crawlers go and if anything gets reviewed, but it could just as well have been a satirical paper published on April 1st and the crawlers would still see it as truth.
This should be top comment, the researchers did such a good job to make sure anyone with even the slightest reading comprehension would realise this is parody.
Regardless of that, the internet has always been full of lies and we cannot expect bad actors to not exploit this.
Hang on. Are you suggesting its unethical/immoral to lie to a machine?
Additionally, the authors didn’t submit the article to a magazine as factual. They posted the articles on a preprint server which can be very questionable anyway as there is no peer review. The machine chose to ignore rigor and treat them as fact.
What you may as well have said:
I really don’t understand why people think that LLMs are GOFAI. They aren’t making the hard choices. They aren’t giving novel solutions to the energy crisis. They aren’t solving the trolley problem. They are shitting out what you feed them. If you feed them garbage, you get garbage in return. No one is surprised when the dog gets worms after eating poop it found in the yard. Why are we shocked that an AI that doesn’t know fact from fiction treats everything the same?
It’s known that AI companies will harvest content without care for its veracity and train LLMs on it. These LLMs will then regurgitate that content as fact.
This isn’t a particularly novel finding but the experiment illustrates it rather well.
The researchers you consider to have acted so immorally did add useless information to the knowledge pool – but it was unadvertised, immediately recognizable useless information that any sane reviewer would’ve flagged. They included subtle clues like thanking someone at Starfleet Academy for letting them use a lab aboard the USS Enterprise. They claimed to have gotten funding from the Sideshow Bob Foundation. Subtle.
By providing this easily traceable nonsense, they were able to turn the generally-but-informally known understanding that LLMs will repeat bullshit into a hard scientific data point that others can build on. Nothing world-changing but still valuable. They basically did what Alan Sokal did.
Instead of worrying about this experiment you should worry about all the misinformation in LLMs that wasn’t provided (and diligently documented) by well-meaning researchers.
I think that’s the problem though, I think the poop in the yard is a better example. Key is the researchers put that information in speculation. That’s like if Anderson Cooper made up a fake news story, and posted it in an anonymous tweet to analyze how far it would spread, and then fox news picks it up and runs with the story all day.
That’s the key problem, people are trusting LLMs to do their research for them, when LLMs just gather all the information they can get their hands on mindlessly.
That’s the key problem, If they send a misinformative article, to a place for untested, unproven random speculation with a very low bar for who can submit… they can determine that LLMs are looking there. Key thing to note is, it’s not their fake disease that’s the threat. It’s that if it found their fake article, then LLMs probably also scooped up a ton of other misinformed or dubious things.
Lets look at it this way, say it was a cake, but we threw it in the garbage, 2 weeks later we find the same cake… at jims bakery, same ID, same distinct marker we put on it.
What does that tell us, it tells us that Jims bakery is clearly sometimes, dumpster diving and putting things up that clearly are dangerous.
That isn’t a fault in the LLM, though, that is a fault in the general make-up of human skepticism, or lack their of. We didn’t invent the word ‘Propaganda’ without having a sentence to use it in. Those that don’t practice skepticism, critical thinking, and even mild reasoning are the ones that will get led astray. That didn’t just start happening when LLMs came around, it’s been here since we first started talking to each other. It’s only more visible now because everything is more visible now. The world is much more connected than it ever has been, and that grows with every literal day. All these fucking idiots that don’t double check what they are being told are the problem, regardless of if it came from an LLM or a human, because I guarantee you they are being led astray by both. They don’t trust the machine because it’s a machine, they trust what they are told because they are lazy. That isn’t the LLMs fault.
I mean it’s a problem in the marketing and common usage of LLMs. That’s exactly it though, LLM companies, and people are describing LLMs as a way to do research.
IE you could say these criticisms come in things like wikipedia too. IE anyone can write what they want, but what does wikipedia require? right every single claim has to be cited. So if you go to wikipedia find misinformation, you click on the number and see it.
If you ask chatgpt What diseases should I be concerned about in africa, it lists you a few. You can then… google it, find the wikipedia page, and look for what’s there. It’s a tool without a purpose at that point. because it literally doesn’t save you any steps. It doesn’t guide you to the source to check it’s facts, when it tells you them it may or may not be making up the sources. At which point, it has no factual use, or use in even directing to the facts.
Seems like the logical conclusion would be then that people who train LLMs should be responsible for curating the data, not expecting that the data will just be sound. People have been lying on the internet since it was invented, the advent of LLMs isn’t suddenly going to create an internet that doesn’t occur in.
And people have been launching products without thought to the ramifications since the dawn of time. I don’t think that will change, either. What we need to do is educate ourselves better when it comes to identifying potential fraud. Taking anything at face value, regardless of it’s source, is dumb. If it’s worth knowing, it’s worth verifying.
This is the missing conceptual understanding that probably 90% of LLM users lack. They really don’t know how LLMs work, and treat them like AGI. Sadly this includes adult policy makers in our society too. Efforts like those of these these researchers act to educate the public. I’m hopeful this will spark some critical thinking on the part of regular, otherwise ignorant, LLM users.
Thanks for saying this in a nicer way than I would’ve.
News outlets are liable for what they publish. LLM vendors should be as well.
They even have the same fix - just post somewhere quietly that it’s “entertainment”
“Liable” means they might post a correction later that nobody will see because corrections aren’t sexy to algorithms. Big deal. LLM vendors are liable in practically the same way.
Corrections are the piece that the public sees, but liability has more to do with being able to prove in court that you took reasonable steps to make sure you were providing accurate information.
LLM companies can just say it’s for entertainment purposes only, kinda like Fox News.
This is about the untraceability of AI slop and the tendency of people to blindly believe stuff that LLMs put out. These news outlets just publish LLM outputs as facts without checking sources. Anyone could poison these LLMs so this is more of a threat model demonstration.