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.

  • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
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    11 days ago

    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.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      this is confusing. did you think I meant you’re engaging in libel against llms or something? that’s the only way I can make sense of your reply.

      • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
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        11 days ago

        Really?

        I read your reply as saying the output is (can be) libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based on a dataset which resolves to anything absolute.

        Maybe we’re just missing each other - struggling to parse each others’ output. ;)

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          11 days ago

          well I must be mixing something because all I’m getting is that you’re saying it’s full of shit as a defense against libel.