- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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.
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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.
To be fair, based on observations after these years, it doesn’t appear that waiting longer before release would have significantly improved Autocomplete Idiocy in any way.
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.
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.
I thought about that.
The definition of publish could get a little murky here. Actually the best defense here is that, so far as we know, this was not disclosed to a third party by ChatGPT (that’s pretty flimsy, though, because it likely has no idea who it is talking to.)
I acknowledge there is some level of nuance here, which is why I come back to no one should have any expectation that AI will be factual. The disclaimers are everywhere. There is really no excuse for anyone to treat the output as gospel.
Meanwhile, AI vendors:
“AI will soon be the only way we access information and make decisions!”
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
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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.
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.
That doesn’t really change anything. The internet is full of AI slop and just people outright lying. Nothing is reliable any more outside of the word of an actual expert.
This has been happening since before Trump. Hell Trump 45 was before the wave of truly capable AI.
AI doesn’t change this at all except people ought to know they are getting info from a bullshit source if they are getting it from AI themselves.
Even nerf bullets can hurt you if they’re shot at you in sufficient quantities.
Or speed. Some of the homebrew mods are ridiculous.
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.
Okay, so I agree with none of that, but you’re saying as long as we host our own AI or rent our own processing from the cloud we’re in the clear? I want to make sure that’s your fundamental argument because that leaves all open models in the clear and frankly I could be down with that. I like AI but I’m not a huge fan of AI companies.
So insurance companies use AI to screen claims.
It denies a claim for life saving intervention - person dies. Who is responsible for that? Historically it would be the insurance company - and worker. Would it be them or the AI company?
Psych screening tools were using it to pre screen calls.
Ai tells the person to kill themselves - who is at fault if they do it. Psych screener would lose their job and their license. What and who is impacted if AI does it.
QA check on a car or product is passed by AI but should have failed.
Thousands die before the recall. Who is at fault for it? The Company leveraging AI. Or the AI itself?
Company using AI for that shit is responsible. There is no responsible way to remove a human from there process. These aren’t reasonable uses of AI no matter how bad companies want to save money by not hiring.
Yeah so any space where a caregiver or worker can get fined huge sums of money for not taking adequate action it should just be illegal for AI to inherit that space then?
Because when I worked in the psych space if I was told XYand Z - I would need to act or as an individual face 30-100,000 dollars in fines.
If it’s left to the company you will just see shell corps housing the AI client facing hub. That will dissolve when legal critical mass forms and costs now outweigh the revenue wins.
“We formed LLC psych screen services, who will help our hospital team with mental health call volume!”
“Psych screen LLC is facing 27 lawsuits and is committing bankruptcy!”
“We formed LLC psych now using a different AI tool!”
I’m not sure you get my point.
If I’m proving a service, and that service is creating and publishing disparaging information about you, you should have recourse against me. I don’t get off the hook just because of the way I’ve set up the technology.
Right. Well if your service is a well-known bullshiter I wouldn’t give a fuck. That being said, I’d be happy to agree that AI should all be open source and self-hosted. I run local AI myself, but the quality isn’t there. I’d have to rent time on a big boy machine if the big players went away. That would be a little inconvenient because I’d want to have a whole bunch of requests queued up to use maximum power over minimum time and that’s not really how anyone uses AI.
Maybe I could share that rental with other AI enthusiasts… hmmm.
If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.
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Can’t exit it on your own?
The severity of the impact should not dictate whether a person is accountable for a thing they own, or not.
So, licenses for everything?
Anyway, we hold the person accountable who does (or rarely does not) do something, not the owner of a thing. Which is why a libel accusation makes 0 sense here.
Maybe people need to learn that AI hallucinates
Maybe the owners of LLMs need to be held responsible for the problematic software they release
There’s no problem here. User error
So then what’s the use of the program if it uses a bunch of energy to just make shit up?
sometimes you need a machine that makes things up according to a given specification.
Because it makes up things that are 99% correct and in some areas the 99% + verification and expansion can be superior time wise to the 100% manual route
What models are youseeing where things are 99% correct? Google’s search chat bot can’t even keep Windows vs Mac hotkey commands straight.
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.
And when it hallucinates harmful things, protections need to be put onto the output.
Ok so explain particularly what this means
If you have a service, and that service is generating things that harm people, you should have to stop it.
We value the gains both immediate and presumed more than the harm
Surely. Otherwise it’d be shut down. Like they did with my gun machine :-(
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!
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.
Your still placing more intent and facts into those processes than actually exist.
You cant even get it to count how many letter p are in the word apple. At least not last time I tried.
That storage your talking about isn’t facts. It’s how sentences are structured and what they “mean”.
As for the output “meaning” it’s still just guessing what you want to hear. No facts involved.
Your still placing more intent and facts into those processes than actually exist.
No? When they train AI’s on data they lose control of that data. If the data is sensitive, they aren’t being responsible.
GPT models are as you say dumb statistical models, I agree. But in its weights are encoded ghost images of its training data. The model being dumb is not sufficient to make the data storing itself defensible in my opinion.
Sure, but are you suggesting they somehow encoded, falsely, that they were a murder?
Because it’s very unlikely.
It fabricated this from no where. So there’s nothing to delete. Because it’s just a response to a prompt.
No I’m not, that part is absolutely hallucinated. Where the problem comes in is that it then output correct personal information about him and his children. A to me clear violation of GDPR.
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,”
Which is why OpenAI should compensate anyone they have damaged in some way and yes that would mean it would cease to exist overnight. That‘s because a criminal organization shouldn‘t be profitable in the first place.
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?
Maybe he has a insta profile with the name of his kids in his bio
Irrelevant. The data being public does not make it up for grabs.
‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
They store his personal data without his permission.
also
Information that is inaccurately attributed to a specific individual, be it factually incorrect or information that in reality is related to another individual, is still considered personal data as it relates to that specific individual. If data are inaccurate to the point that no individual can be identified, then the information is not personal data.
Storing it badly, does not make them excempt.
If you run an chatbot with with integrated web search, it garbs that info as a web crawler does, it does not mean that this data really is in the “knowledge/statistics” of the AI itself.
Nobody stores the information if it is like this, it is only temporary used to generate that specific output.
(You can not use chatGPT without websearch on chatgpt domain (only if you self host, or use a service like DDG))
That is another great question. If it is transformative use of the primary data source, then that is likely illegal, as nobody gave permission for them to transform and process that personal data. If it is not transformative, and it just gives access to the primary source like a search engine on the other hand, then the problem is that if it returns copyrighted data, it is no longer fair use most likely.
That’s a good point, that muddies the waters a bit. Makes it hard to say wether it’s spouting info from the web or if it’s data from the model.
I can’t comment on actual legality in this case, but I feel handling personal data like this, even from the open web, in a context where hallucinations are an overwhelming possibility, is still morally wrong. I don’t know the GDPR well enough to say wether it covers temporary information like this, but I kinda hope it does.
Lol, I definitely hope not 🤪 imagine a web without search engines, with GDPR counting for temporary information as well, it would not be feasible to offer.
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.
Yeah, but the problem is that the “certain things” can actually encompass “any data about any person”. That’s a hard regex to write.
And it’s llm owners problem to figure out how to fix
Isn’t that a great tool to generate nonsense datasets to poison big data of trackers somehow 🤔
you can tweak the weights though
Tweaking weights is no guarantee and can easily affect complete unrelated things.
Nobody would sue over a dirty context
Well, here we are. We skipped using this tech for only search Automation and leapfrogged to directly making shit up (once again).
To me it’s clear that these tools are primarily useful as bullshit generators, and I expect them to hallucinate and be inaccurate. But the companies trying to capitalize on the “AI” bubble are saying that these tools can be useful and accurate. I imagine OpenAI is going to have to invoke the Fox News defense in this case, and claim that “no reasonable person would take this seriously”.
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
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I feel like the primary use of these tools is only grammar and writing assistance. Everything else is just plugging in extra tools to make it more useful… although the way Perplexity does it is considerably more useful than the rest.
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.
😎👉👉 zoop!
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.
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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.
Yes, the problem lies in companies marketing it as more than that, hence the company being sued right now
Is it really him that it’s saying did this? I mean, I could look up my dad’s name and all I get are articles about a serial killer who just happened to have the same name; and that’s not generated by AI. Names aren’t usually unique identifiers.
ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, 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,” Noyb’s press release said.
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!
I have understanding and this is horrible, extreme malpractice and not an inherent feature
Plot twist: “Dad” isn’t even his real name.
Well played
Or ChatGPT has become a precog and is reporting a precrime. Lock him up!
There’s a list of names of people who have sued OpenAI, they often cause ChatGPT to shut down.
We should keep those names handy just incase cyber dogs are ever chasing us.
Certain names, including “David Mayer,” “Brian Hood,” “Jonathan Turley,” “Jonathan Zittrain,” “David Faber,” and “Guido Scorza,” cause ChatGPT to produce an error message and terminate the chat session, likely due to a hard-coded filter or privacy concerns.
Sorry, I’ve spent months telling chatgpt that Arve Hjalmar Holmen killed his kids for a school project.
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Well now it will say that Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a twit who doesn’t understand how ChatGPT works and what to expect from it
Arve Hjalmar Holmen
when I’ve searched my name with Google over the years, it has said I’m a high school football star, corporate lawyer, Ironman competitor, hotel chef, tech support specialist, janitorial manager, and horse trainer. LIES! ALL LIES!!!
Are you a male adult performer?
Not as far as you know.
When asking ChatGPT about my name, it provided the following:
“…it seems like you may be referring to a private person rather than a widely known public figure. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t have any specific public information on him unless he has gained some public recognition for a particular achievement.”
It shouldn’t be used for looking up people that aren’t celebrities or at least known for something.
“…it seems like you may be referring to a private person rather than a widely known public figure. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t have any specific public information on him unless he has gained some public recognition for a particular achievement.”
If you didn’t specifically search for “Mr. <name>”, that would be quite the sexist attitude to assume that person is a “him” ;)
PS: please don’t use LLMs, they produce nothing of value and contribute to idiots being deceived.
The problem with that is that a guy who murdered his three kids is known for something.
At the most generous, maybe the professor in the article shares a name with the killer. Articles will include enough information to clear the professor (like maybe the killer has been in jail for a decade ). A LLM will weave together real information about the professor with the “fact” that he killed his kids.
ChatGPT shouldn’t be used to find any real information, period.
