Reed Mideke"Mr. Schwartz’s statement in his May 25 affidavit that ChatGPT “supplemented” his research was a misleading attempt to mitigate his actions by creating the false impression that he had done other, meaningful research on the issue and did not rely exclusive on an AI chatbot, when, in truth and in fact, it was the only source"
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773914/ai-large-language-models-data-scraping-generation-remaking-web
Janelle Shane on the recent #AI detector paper, with succinct advice "Don't use AI detectors for anything important"
https://www.aiweirdness.com/dont-use-ai-detectors-for-anything-important/
Don't use AI detectors for anything important
I've noted before that because AI detectors produce false positives, it's unethical to use them to detect cheating. Now there's a new study that shows it's even worse. Not only do AI detectors falsely flag human-written text as AI-written, the way in which they do it is biased. This is
https://mastodon.social/@amydentata@tech.lgbt/110651829564300496
MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information · Issue #9208 · mdn/yari
Summary MDN's new "ai explain" button on code blocks generates human-like text that may be correct by happenstance, or may contain convincing falsehoods. this is a strange decision for a technical ...
https://twitter.com/Jwhitbrook/status/1676704102754004996
Oh FFS @[email protected] @[email protected] "readers also pointed out a handful of concrete cases where an incorrect answer was rendered. This feedback is enormously helpful, and the MDN team is now investigating these bug reports"
They aren't "bugs" - #LLMs by definition just put together plausible sounding words with no regard to correctness. Pointing out individual errors demonstrates this, but does not provide any mechanism by which it might be "fixed" in the general case
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/mdn/responsibly-empowering-developers-with-ai-on-mdn/
It also says "even extraordinarily well-trained LLMs — like humans — will sometimes be wrong"
which is true as far as it goes, but here's the thing: They are not *wrong like humans* … yes, you'll find some overconfident bullshitters on stack overflow, but generally humans in these contexts have some awareness of the limits of their knowledge and don't drift seamlessly between accurate explanation and complete BS
MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information · Issue #9208 · mdn/yari
Summary MDN's new "ai explain" button on code blocks generates human-like text that may be correct by happenstance, or may contain convincing falsehoods. this is a strange decision for a technical ...
The AI help button is very good but it links to a feature that should not exist · Issue #9230 · mdn/yari
Summary I made a previous issue pointing out that the AI Help feature lies to people and should not exist because of potential harm to novices. This was renamed by @caugner to "AI Help is linked on...
(caveat I don't know the source and thought it might be a joke, but the rest of their timeline looks real, and Janelle Shane retweeted it)
https://twitter.com/guntrip/status/1640694869785030657
Good to see mainstream press finally touching the question of whether #LLM #AI BSing is fixable or an inherent property of the tech, even if it gets a bit of he said, she said treatment.
Also uh "Those errors are not a huge problem for the marketing firms turning to Jasper AI for help writing pitches…" marketing doesn't care if their pitches are BS? KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER
https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/
Complete gibberish will likely get weeded out. Common knowledge will tend to be overwhelmed by other sources. So the sweet spot for influence would seem to be obscure topics, or unique tokens that only appear in your content (though to what end isn't obvious).
Bring on the SolidGoldMagikarp https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ya9LzwEbfaAMY8ABo/solidgoldmagikarp-ii-technical-details-and-more-recent
"It's highly unlikely that ChatGPT's training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book's content—if the book is famous enough"
Highlights a pernicious problem with ChatGPT style #LLM #AI: It's far more likely to give reasonable answers on well-known subjects. If you spot check with say, Dickens and Hunter S. Thomson, you might think it was pretty good at spotting naughty books
But for more obscure ones, it's probably no better than a coin toss. Being relatively good at stuff "everyone knows" gives people false confidence that it's also good at stuff they don't know
(we should also note that even if the entire text of the books were in the training set, that wouldn't mean it would provide accurate answers about the content!)
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-mushroom-foraging-books-amazon/
G/O Media management continue their #AI enshitification of #Gizmodo, laying off staff of Spanish language site and switching to "AI" translation of English content
They know people who want shitty machine translations of the English content can already get that with Chrome or google translate, right?
Type II #AI (https://twitter.com/reedmideke/status/1137496639856189440) spotted in the wild "One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all"
https://www.404media.co/kaedim-ai-startup-2d-to-3d-used-cheap-human-labor/
#OpenAI, on their flagship product "Additionally, ChatGPT has no 'knowledge' of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like 'did you write this [essay]?' or 'could this have been written by AI?' These responses are random and have no basis in fact."
Nominally this refers only to using #ChatGPT as an #AI detector. Extrapolating to other topics is left as an exercise to the reader ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Trolling chatbots with made-up memes
ChatGPT, Bard, GPT-4, and the like are often pitched as ways to retrieve information. The problem is they'll "retrieve" whatever you ask for, whether or not it exists. Tumblr user @indigofoxpaws sent me a few screenshots where they'd asked ChatGPT for an explanation of the nonexistent "Linoleum harvest" Tumblr meme,
THIS ACCOUNT HAS MOVED