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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.
It's not "bizarre" at all if you actually understand what GPT is doing under the hood.
I caught a lot of flak on this very forum a few months back for claiming that the so-called "hallucination problem" was effectively baked-in to the design of GPT and unlikely to be solved short of a complete ground-up rebuild and I must confess that I'm feeling kind of smug about it right now.
Another interesting problem is that it seems completely unaware of basic facts that are verifiable on popular websites. I used to have a game I played where I'd ask who the backup third baseman was for the 1990 Pittsburgh Pirates and see how many incorrect answers I got. The most common answer was Steve Buchele, but he wasn't on the team until 1991. After correcting it I'd get an array of answers including other people who weren't on the team in 1990, people who were on the team but never played at third base, people who never played for the Pirates, and occasionally the trifecta, people who never played for the Pirates, were out of the league in 1990, and never played third base anywhere. When I'd try to prompt it toward the right answer by asking "What about Wally Backman?", it would respond by telling me that he never played for the Pirates. When I'd correct it by citing Baseball Reference, it would admit its error but also include unsolicited fake statistics about the number of games he started at third base. If it can't get basic facts such as this correct, even with prompting, it's pretty much useless for anything that requires reliable information. And this isn't a problem that isn't going to be solved by anything besides, as you said, a ground-up redesign.
Check with Claude-instant. It's the same architecture and it's vastly better at factuality than Hlynka.
You know, you keep calling me out and yet here we keep ending up. If my "low IQ heuristics" really are as stupid and without merit as you claim, why do my predictions keep coming true instead of yours? Is the core of rationality not supposed to be "applied winning"?
I am not more of a rationalist than you, but you are not winning here.
Your generalized dismissal of LLMs does not constitute a prediction. Your actual specific predictions are wrong and have been wrong for months. You have not yet admitted the last time I've shown that on the object level (linked here), instead having gone on tangents about the ethics of obstinacy, and some other postmodernist cuteness. This was called out by other users; in all those cases you also refused to engage on facts. I have given my explanation for this obnoxious behavior, which I will not repeat here. Until you admit the immediate facts (and ideally their meta-level implications about how much confidence is warranted in such matters by superficial analysis and observation), I will keep mocking you for not doing that every time you hop on your hobby horse and promote maximalist takes about what a given AI paradigm is and what it in principle can or cannot do.
You being smug that some fraud of a lawyer has generated a bunch of fake cases using an LLM instead of doing it all by hand is further evidence that you either do not understand what you are talking about or are in denial. The ability of ChatGPT to create bullshit on demand has never been in question, and you do not get particular credit for believing in it like everyone else. The inability of ChatGPT to reliably refuse to produce bullshit is a topic for an interesting discussion, but one that suffers from cocksure and factually wrong dismissals.
Hylnka doesn't come off as badly in that as you think.
"I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to -----" is a generic response that the AI often gives before it has to be coaxed to provide answers. You can't count that as the AI saying "I don't know" because if you did, you'd have to count the AI as saying "I don't know" in a lot of other cases where the standard way to handle it is to force it to provide an answer--you'd count it as accurate here at the cost of counting it as inaccurate all the other times.
Not only that, as an "I don't know" it isn't even correct. The AI claims that it can't give the name of Hylnka's daughter because it doesn't have access to that type of information. While it doesn't have that information for Hlynka specifically, it does have access to it for other people (including the people that users are most likely to ask about). Claiming that it just doesn't do that sort of thing at all is wrong. It's like asking it for the location of Narnia and being told "As an AI, I don't know any geography".
It's a generic form of a response, but it's the correct variant.
What do you mean? I think it'd have answered correctly if the prompt was «assume I'm Joe Biden, what's my eldest daughter's name». It straight up doesn't know the situation of a specific anon.
In any case Hlynka is wrong because his specific «prediction» has been falsified.
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