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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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What you are describing should actually be the job of the people making a pay to use AI. AIs should be trained not to lie or invent sources at the source. That Chat GPT lies a lot is a result of its trainers rewarding lying through incompetence or ideology.

Training AI not to lie implies that the AI understands what "lying" is which as I keep pointing out, GPT clearly does not.

Because the trainers don't know when it is lying. So it is rewarded for being a good liar.

If you're telling me that the trainers are idiots I agree

They are probably idiots. But they are also probably incentivized for speed over accuracy ( I had a cooling off period between jobs once and did MTurk and it was obviously like that). If you told the AI it was unacceptably wrong anytime it made up a fake source, it would learn to only cite real sources.

Chat GPT is rewarded for a combination of "usefulness" and "honesty", which are competing tradeoffs, because the only way for it to ensure 100% honesty is for it to never make any claims at all. Any claim it tells you has a chance to be wrong, not only because the sources it was trained on might have been wrong, but because it's not actually pulling sources in real time, it's all memorized. It attempts to memorize the entire internet in a form of a token generating algorithm, and the process is inherently noisy and unreliable.

So... in so far as its trainers reward it saying things anyway despite its inherent noisiness, this is kind of rewarding it lying. But it's not explicitly being rewarded for increasing its lying rate (except for specific culture war issues that aren't especially relevant to the notion of instance of inventing case files). It literally can't tell the difference between fake case files and real ones, it just generates words that it thinks sound good.

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