You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)

Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    They keep saying it’s impossible, when the truth is it’s just expensive.

    That’s why they wont do it.

    You could only train AI with good sources (scientific literature, not social media) and then pay experts to talk with the AI for long periods of time, giving feedback directly to the AI.

    Essentially, if you want a smart AI you need to send it to college, not drop it off at the mall unsupervised for 22 years and hope for the best when you pick it back up.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      6 months ago

      No he’s right that it’s unsolved. Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too. If you’ve ever been in a highly active comment section you’ll notice certain “hallucinations” developing, usually because someone came along and sounded confident and everyone just believed them.

      We don’t even know how to get full people to do this, so how does a fancy markov chain do it? It can’t. I don’t think you solve this problem without AGI, and that’s something AI evangelists don’t want to think about because then the conversation changes significantly. They’re in this for the hype bubble, not the ethical implications.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        We do know. It’s called critical thinking education. This is why we send people to college. Of course there are highly educated morons, but we are edging bets. This is why the dismantling or coopting of education is the first thing every single authoritarian does. It makes it easier to manipulate masses.

    • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’m addition to the other comment, I’ll add that just because you train the AI on good and correct sources of information, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it will give you a correct answer all the time. It’s more likely, but not ensured.

      • RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Yes, thank you! I think this should be written in capitals somewhere so that people could understand it quicker. The answers are not wrong or right on purpose. LLMs don’t have any way of distinguishing between the two.

    • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      The truth is, this is the perfect type of a comment that makes an LLM hallucinate. Sounds right, very confident, but completely full of bullshit. You can’t just throw money on every problem and get it solved fast. This is an inheret flaw that can only be solved by something else than a LLM and prompt voodoo.

      They will always spout nonsense. No way around it, for now. A probabilistic neural network has zero, will always have zero, and cannot have anything but zero concept of fact - only stastisically probable result for a given prompt.

      It’s a politician.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      I let you in on a secret: scientific literature has its fair share of bullshit too. The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit. Unless its the most blatant horseshit you’ve scientifically ever seen. So while it absolutely makes sense to say, let’s just train these on good sources, there is no source that is just that. Of course it is still better to do it like that than as they do it now.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        The issue is, it is much harder to figure out its bullshit.

        Google AI suggested you put glue on your pizza because a troll said it on Reddit once…

        Not all scientific literature is perfect. Which is one of the many factors that will stay make my plan expensive and time consuming.

        You can’t throw a toddler in a library and expect them to come out knowing everything in all the books.

        AI needs that guided teaching too.