[HN Gopher] Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge i... ___________________________________________________________________ Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused Author : scraptor Score : 258 points Date : 2023-05-27 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net) (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net) | pylua wrote: | What needs to exist is a legal compiler that lawyers can plug | responses into from these tools. Sort of how a developer would | use chat gpt. | | A giant rules engine for the law. I'm surprised one doesn't exist | or isn't in progress that I know of. Seems like it would be very | helpful | inopinatus wrote: | There isn't one because the law is not a programming language. | | Believing otherwise is a common misconception amongst | engineers, but representing law as such is (as I have said in | this forum before) a leading cause of disappointment, | frustration, bickering, anger, conflict, and vexatiously long | and mostly unenforceable contracts. | | Observance of law is fundamentally about alignment with | principles, not blindly following a set of rules. The latter | debility is more properly associated with the administration of | law, especially at its most mediocre and ritualistic. | crooked-v wrote: | "The law is code" falls apart as soon as you have to take | judges into account. | simonwlol wrote: | [dead] | Covzire wrote: | Guessing we'll see this excuse a lot more: Get caught making | stuff up, blame ChatGPT. | tmaly wrote: | I have asked ChatGPT to cite sources when I have doubts. | | I am often times able to confirm these sources. | | Seems this lawyer just took ChatGPT at its word without | validating the cases. | londons_explore wrote: | Or maybe validated one or two, and then assumed they must all | be correct. | tmaly wrote: | I often want good data, so I validate everything. | | ChatGPT tends to only give a limited number of results in the | response. | lamp987 wrote: | this is the future of lawyers, doctors, engineers, school | teachers... | | dark times are ahead. | garganzol wrote: | At the same time, the inventiveness of AI sometimes gives quite | a few fruitful ideas for a solution. Yes, formally this can be | classified as AI hallucinations, but sometimes they are so | bright and well-aimed that I get goosebumps. | | My favorite one is phind.com - it gave me so many slightly | hallucinating but nevertheless useful advices. And I was able | to incorporate most of them into my professional work. | | The whole situation reminds me of a good friend of mine - he's | super talented at inventing things and brainstorming, but he | can often be caught misrepresenting the facts, and sometimes | outright lying. However, the pros easily outweigh the cons if | you know who you're working with. | blibble wrote: | individuals that use ChatGPT losing/being struck off because it | generates garbage? | paulhart wrote: | There's a joke about "an LLB having an LLM" in here somewhere. | civilized wrote: | Steven Schwartz not only obviously lied re: "I was unaware of the | possibility that ChatGPT could generate false information", his | own screenshots prove it. He asked if one of the cases generated | was fake! | | I suspect that during the research his System 1 (fast, intuitive | thinking) told him he was not responsible for the risk he knew he | was incurring by relaying AI generated text. It was more like | ChatGPT was his own legal secretary which he was within his | rights to trust, just like the main lawyer in the case, LoDuca, | trusted him to produce this research. | | The proceedings would have been more interesting if Schwartz had | been honest about this, rather than going with the easily | discoverable lie. | | On the other hand, it's always funny when people realize they've | got themselves into deep shit and they decide the best way out is | to essentially plead insanity. | rickreynoldssf wrote: | There's nothing wrong with starting with ChatGPT but the lazy | ambulance chaser couldn't be bothered with a quick lookup in | Westlaw. That's where things start going wrong. | travisgriggs wrote: | ChatGPT: The ultimate parlor^H^H^Hrot trick | ZephyrBlu wrote: | I read this as malicious/intentional initially. Do people really | think they can 100% believe ChatGPT? | | Especially for someone like a lawyer I would expect to them | verify any information they get from ChatGPT. | ineedasername wrote: | Hilarious. It's important to remember: | | 1) ChatGPT is not a research tool | | 2) It sort of _resembles_ one and will absolutely _act_ like one | if you ask it to, and it it may even produce useful results! | But... | | 3) You have to independently verify any factual statement it | makes and also | | 4) In my experience the longer the chat session, the more likely | it is to hallucinate, reiterate, and double down on previous | output | numpad0 wrote: | 0) It calculates on data YOU SUPPLY. If the data is incomplete | or incorrect, it tries its best to fill in blanks with | plausible, but fabricated, data. You MAY NOT ask it an open | ended or non-hypothetical question that require grounding | beyond included in the input. | | e.g. "given following sentence, respond with the best | summarization:, <string>" is okay; "what is a sponge cake" is | not. | [deleted] | xkcd1963 wrote: | I don't think it makes sense to call ChatGPT hallucinating when | it returns wrong facts. Hallucinations imply that the | protagonist can distinguish reality from something | hallucinated. ChatGPT cannot distinguish facts from fiction. | sickcodebruh wrote: | This is completely true but completely in conflict with how | many very large companies advertise it. I'm a paid GitHub | Copilot user and recently started using their chat tool. It | lies constantly and convincingly, so often that I'm starting to | wonder if it wastes more time than it saves. It's simply not | capable of reliably doing its job. This is on a "Tesla | autopilot" level of misrepresenting a product but on a larger | scale. I hope it continues being little more than a benign or | embarrassing time-waster. | dmix wrote: | Where does Github misrepresent their Chat beta? On their | marketing website? | YetAnotherNick wrote: | One of the only text written in chatgpt's own website that | comes each time when you chat with it is "ChatGPT may produce | inaccurate information about people, places, or facts." | oytis wrote: | AI will not destroy the humanity. People who use AI will. | stavros wrote: | By the way, Simon can't get ChatGPT to say that the particular | case is true _because he's asking about a particular case_. | ChatGPT doesn't know it said anything about this case in another | session, so it won't confirm it's true. | | Either ask it for some other legal sources and ask if those are | true (and then try to see if a few aren't), or use the API to | feed it its own answer about Varghese etc and then see if it will | say it's true (because at that point you've made it think it said | this). | internetguy wrote: | I don't get it... These are PROFESSIONAL lawyers that have gone | to years of law school. How do they not know how to double check | an answer from ChatGPT? I'm sure there's databases of cases | online, it shouldn't be this difficult. | knodi wrote: | Idiots come in many sizes. | it_citizen wrote: | If the whole covid vaccine debate taught me one thing is that | there are idiots in every jobs, even the most qualified. | tarxvf wrote: | I love how the current world is such that people on both | sides of that would agree with your statement. :D | | (Don't clarify it, it's better this way.) | lolinder wrote: | > I apologize for the confusion earlier. Upon double-checking, I | found that the case Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. Ltd., | 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), does indeed exist and can be | found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. | | This is the part that stood out to me the most. I've seen this "I | apologize for the confusion earlier" language many times when | using ChatGPT, and it's always when it's walking back on | something that it previously said. In fact, everything about this | quote sounds like a retraction. | | If this is a retraction then that means that there are missing | screenshots in Attachment 1 wherein ChatGPT stated the cases were | fictitious, and Schwartz pushed back until it retracted the | retraction. | | I'm with Simon on this one, I think Schwartz realized his career | is over and is frantically trying anything he can to cover for | his mistake. | B1FF_PSUVM wrote: | > ChatGPT, as it often does, hallucinated wildly | | Plausible bullshit generation for free, as if there's not enough | already available cheap. | TechBro8615 wrote: | The lawyer was just trying to outsource his job of plausible | bullshit generation. He would have gotten away with it, too, if | it weren't for the fake cases. | akiselev wrote: | I went ahead and asked ChatGPT with the browsing plugin [1] | because I was curious and it answered that it was a real case | citing an article _about the fake citations!_ After some prodding | ( "Are you sure?") it spat out something slightly saner citing | this very article! | | _> The case "Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., 925 | F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019)" was cited in court documents, but it | appears that there might be some confusion or controversy | surrounding this citation. It was mentioned in a list of cases | for which a lawyer was ordered to provide copies, according to a | court order on leagle.com [2] . However, a blog post on | simonwillison.net suggests that the case might not be genuine and | that it might have been generated by a language model such as | ChatGPT. The post discusses a situation where a lawyer might have | used generated case citations in court documents without fully | understanding the tool they were using. The post also includes | screenshots where the language model appears to confirm the | existence of the case [3]._ | | The output is hilariously bad and it's depressing a licensed | attorney actually pulled this crap. | | This is just more evidence that ChatGPT should not be used for | anything serious without a trained human in the loop. | | [1] | https://chat.openai.com/share/a6e27cf2-b9a6-4740-be2e-fdddab... | | [2] https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20230414825 | | [3] https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/ (The | TFA!) | jimsimmons wrote: | In the loop there indeed was a allegedly trained human in this | instance | akiselev wrote: | That's not what I would call in the loop. He didn't check | that the sources were real. | | By "in the loop" I mean actively validating statements of | fact generated by ChatGPT | jimsimmons wrote: | Well they had every opportunity to inspect its output. | Where in the loop and what gets inspected is not an easy | problem to solve. | dunham wrote: | Wow, I asked Bard to summarize the NYT article and it completely | changed the outcome: | | > Sure. The article is about a man named Roberto Mata who sued | Avianca Airlines after he was injured when a metal serving cart | struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport | in New York. His lawyer used a new language model called ChatGPT | to help him with the case. ChatGPT is a large language model that | can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of | creative content, and answer your questions in an informative | way. It was trained on a massive dataset of text and code, and it | can be used for a variety of tasks, including writing legal | documents. In Mr. Mata's case, ChatGPT helped him to draft a | lawsuit that was more persuasive and comprehensive than what he | could have written on his own. The lawsuit was eventually | successful, and Mr. Mata was awarded damages. This case shows the | potential of ChatGPT and other language models to help lawyers | with their work. | disillusioned wrote: | > He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify | that the cases were real. It had said yes. | | It turns out, asking an unreliable narrator if it's being | reliable is not a sound strategy. | [deleted] | londons_explore wrote: | I wonder if this is a tactic so the court to deems this lawyer | incompetent rather than giving the (presumably much harsher) | penalty for deliberately lying to the court? | leereeves wrote: | Why assume malice? Asking ChatGPT to verify is exactly what | someone who trusts ChatGPT might do. | | I'm not surprised this lawyer trusted ChatGPT too much. | People trust their lives to self driving cars, trust their | businesses to AI risk models, trust criminal prosecution to | facial recognition. People outside the AI field seem to be | either far too trusting or far too suspicious of AI. | acka wrote: | Quoted directly from my last session with ChatGPT mere | seconds ago: | | > Limitations | | May occasionally generate incorrect information | | May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased | content | | Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 | | --- | | A lawyer who isn't prepared to read and heed the very | obvious warnings at the start of every ChatGPT chat isn't | worth a briefcase of empty promises. | | WARNING: witty ending of previous sentence written with | help from ChatGPT. | leereeves wrote: | I agree the lawyer shouldn't have trusted ChatGPT, but | I'm not comfortable with the idea that the lawyer bears | all the responsibility for using ChatGPT and | Microsoft/OpenAI bear no responsibility for creating it. | | "May occasionally generate incorrect information" is not | a sufficient warning. Even Lexis-Nexis has a similar | warning: "The accuracy, completeness, adequacy or | currency of the Content is not warranted or guaranteed." | | And in any case, it seems like you agree with me that the | lawyer was incompetent rather than malicious. | jeroenhd wrote: | I don't think the insanity plea works out well for lawyers. | I'm not sure if "I'm too stupid to be a lawyer" is that much | better than "I lied to the courts". | dragonwriter wrote: | This explanation is a cause of an expansion of the scope of | the show cause order for the lawyer to additional bases for | sanctions, as well as its expansion to the other involved | lawyer and their firm, so if it was a strategic narrative, it | backfired spectacularly already. | sampo wrote: | Remember that professor who fed student essays to ChatGPT and | asked if it wrote them. Mostly ChatGPT would reply yes, and the | professor proceeded to fail the students. | perihelions wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35963163 | | ( _" Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- | claiming they used ChatGTP_ [sic]", 277 comments) | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980121 | | ( _" Texas professor failed half of class after ChatGPT | claimed it wrote their papers_", 22 comments) | jrockway wrote: | My main takeaway is that failing the second half of the | class and misspelling ChatGPT leads to > 10x engagement. | einpoklum wrote: | My main takeway is that the guy who registers chatgtp.com | is going to make a lot of money by providing bogus | answers to frivolous questions :-) | perihelions wrote: | Err, out of abundance of caution, the misspelling of | "ChatGPT" which I [sic]'d is original to the Texas A&M | professor, who repeated the misspelling multiple times in | his email/rant. The HN poster quoted the professor | literally, and I am thus transitively [sic]'ing the | professor - not the HN poster. I am not mocking an HN | poster's typo. | Dalewyn wrote: | It still leaves the burning question whether it's half or | the whole pie. :V | masklinn wrote: | Funnily enough chatgpt had no more idea about that than about | these legal cases, it lives in a state of perpetual | hallucination and making stuff up is its only mode of | operation. | throwawayForMe2 wrote: | It hallucinates a sequence of tokens, and we hallucinate | meaning. | coldtea wrote: | Q. Can you lie? | | A. As an artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI, I | don't have personal emotions, thoughts, or intentions, so I don't | lie in the way humans do. My purpose is to provide accurate and | helpful information based on the training I've received. However, | it's important to note that the information I provide is only as | accurate as the data I was trained on. If there's inaccurate or | misleading information in that data, I might unintentionally | output incorrect or misleading information. But this isn't | considered "lying" in the human sense because it doesn't involve | any intentional deceit on my part. | | A: How do you know it didn't really "involve any intentional | deceit"? | | Q: As an AI model, I don't have consciousness, emotions, or | intentions. The concept of "intention" applies to beings with | consciousness and subjective experiences, which AI, including me, | does not possess. I generate responses purely based on patterns | learned during training, and there's no intent behind them | because I don't have a mind, thoughts, or consciousness. | | When I state there's no "intentional deceit," it's based on this | understanding of AI. AI does not make choices or decisions the | way a human would. If a mistake or inaccuracy occurs in my | responses, it's due to limitations in the data I was trained on | or in my design, not because of a deliberate attempt to mislead | or deceive. AI functions based on its programming and training, | not on intentions or conscious thought. | | Q: That's begging the question though. Your answer takes for | granted that you "don't have a mind, thoughts, or consciousness". | What if actual consciousness (say, in humans) is also "based on | patterns learned during training", only different being that | human training involves sensory experience and not just a corpus | of text and images? | | A: Your question delves into one of the most fascinating and | debated topics in the fields of cognitive science, philosophy, | and AI: the nature of consciousness. As of my last update in | September 2021, there's no universally accepted definition of | consciousness or a definitive understanding of its mechanisms. | | We do understand that human consciousness is associated with our | brains, which process a wide range of sensory and internal | information, and it's accompanied by a subjective experience -- | an "inner life" or "qualia". This isn't something we've observed | or been able to replicate in AI. | | AI models like me, based on GPT-4 architecture, operate on | patterns in data. The way I generate responses is by predicting | the next piece of text based on what I've learned from the corpus | of text I was trained on. However, there's no subjective | experience involved in this process -- there's no "I" that's | interpreting or experiencing anything. I don't have a concept of | self, and I don't have feelings or personal thoughts. | | While some AI models can mimic aspects of human behavior or | cognition to a certain extent, there's a vast difference between | mimicking and actually experiencing. When it comes to | consciousness -- the inner subjective experience -- we don't have | evidence that AI can possess this feature. | | Your question is profound and important, and scientists, | philosophers, and AI experts are continuously exploring these | topics. The answers, however, are likely to remain uncertain for | a while. | | Q: So, theoretically at least, a future model of the GTP | architecture could be conscious and even lie? | | A: Theoretically, it's possible that future advances in AI and | cognitive science could lead to the development of systems that | possess some form of consciousness. However, as of my knowledge | cutoff in September 2021, there's no consensus among scientists | and AI researchers that this is achievable or even definable in | the context of AI. | | The concept of a machine consciousness would likely require a | significant evolution of our understanding of both consciousness | and AI. It might require capabilities far beyond pattern | recognition and prediction, which are the fundamental basis of | current AI systems like the GPT-4 model. It might also | necessitate a rethinking of ethical and philosophical | considerations surrounding AI. | | In terms of an AI "lying," if future AI systems were developed to | simulate a higher level of cognitive complexity, including the | ability to simulate deceptive behavior, they could potentially | generate outputs that are intentionally misleading. However, it's | important to understand that this would not be lying in the human | sense. It would be a result of the programming and functionality | that the AI has been designed to exhibit, not a conscious choice | made by the AI. | | It's also critical to note that OpenAI and many other AI research | and development organizations are committed to ensuring the | ethical use and development of AI technologies. If an AI were to | exhibit behavior that could harm people, such as deceptive | behavior, it would be seen as a serious ethical issue that would | need to be addressed. | armchairhacker wrote: | [flagged] | akiselev wrote: | Did you just have ChatGPT make up all these cases for you? My | ChatGPT can't find any of them. | armchairhacker wrote: | What? I told mine to double-check and it was absolutely | certain they are real court cases | akiselev wrote: | Spoiler alert: it lied. | | For example, "Smith v. Johnson, 579 F.3d 820 (4th Cir. | 2023)" aka _579 F.3d 820_ is actually American River | Transp. Co. v. Ryan, 579 F.3d 820 (7th Cir. 2009) [1] | | "Baxter v. Pennsylvania Legal Ethics Board, 100 A.3d 1095 | (Pa. 2022)" aka _100 A.3d 1095_ is actually Julius L. | Worthy v. United States, 100 A.3d 1095 (D.C. 2014) [2] | | "Rodriguez, 720 F.2d 124 (9th Cir. 2023)" aka _720 F.2d | 124_ is actually Specialty Equipment Market Ass 'n v. | Ruckelshaus, 720 F.2d 124 (D.C. Cir. 1983) [3] | | [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1358353/american- | river... | | [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2741033/julius-l- | worth... | | [3] | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/7902070/specialty- | equi... | simonw wrote: | I think you're joking but I can't quite tell! | swayvil wrote: | Any sufficiently advanced bullshit is indistinguishable from | truth. | mehwoot wrote: | _No, it did not "double-check"--that's not something it can do! | And stating that the cases "can be found on legal research | databases" is a flat out lie._ | | _What's harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. | What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a | model that does this?_ | | It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans | do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify something, | that's all GPT knows or cares about. | taberiand wrote: | ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. | | It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a | subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability | the constraints of the model. | | It did that admirably. It's not its fault, or in my opinion | OpenAI's fault, that the output is being misunderstood and | misused by people who can't be bothered understanding it and | project their own ideas of how it should function onto it. | clnq wrote: | This harks back to around 1999 when people would often blame | computers for mistakes in their math, documents, reports, | sworn filings, and so on. Then, a thousand different | permutations of "computers don't make mistakes" or "computers | are never wrong" became popular sayings. | | Large Language Models (LLMs) are never wrong, and they do not | make mistakes. They are not fact machines. Their purpose is | to abstract knowledge and to produce plausible language. | | GPT-4 is actually quite good at handling facts, yet it still | hallucinates facts that are not common knowledge, such as | legal ones. GPT-3.5, the original ChatGPT and the non-premium | version, is less effective with even slightly obscure facts, | like determining if a renowned person is a member of a | particular organization. | | This is why we can't always have nice things. This is why AI | must be carefully aligned to make it safe. Sooner or later, a | lawyer might consider the plausible language produced by LLMs | to be factual. Then, a politician might do the same, followed | by a teacher, a therapist, a historian, or even a doctor. I | thought the warnings about its tendency to hallucinate speech | were clear -- those warnings displayed the first time you | open ChatGPT. To most people, I believe they were. | SantalBlush wrote: | It is designed to give the illusion that it reasons the way a | human does, which is why many people are using it. To blame | the average user--who quite obviously doesn't understand how | LLMs work--isn't fair, either. | | A lawyer, however, should have vetted a new piece of tech | before using it in this way. | coldtea wrote: | > _ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie._ | | If it lies like a duck, it is a lying duck. | revertmean wrote: | If it quacks like a duck, it's more likely that's it one of | these https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zyyini-Whistle-Carring- | Suitable-Bar... | aaronblohowiak wrote: | Hallucinated not lied. | olalonde wrote: | It doesn't lie like a duck. It unintentionally says | falsehoods. Lying is intentional. | lamontcg wrote: | It doesn't really matter. | | This always bugs me about how people judge politicians | and other public figures not by what they've actually | done, but some ideal of what is in their "heart of | hearts" and their intentions and argue that they've just | been constrained by the system they were in or whatever. | | Or when judging the actions of nations, people often give | all kinds of excuses based on intentions gone wrong | (apparently forgetting that whole "road to hell is paved | with good intentions" bit). | | Intentions don't really matter. Our interface to everyone | else is their external actions, that's what you've got to | judge them on. | | Just say that GPT/LLMs will lie, gaslight and bullshit. | It doesn't matter that they don't have an intention to do | that, it is just what they do. Worrying about intentions | just clouds your judgement. | coldtea wrote: | That's irrelevant to whether it lies like a duck or not. | | The expression "if it X like a duck" means precisely that | we should judge a thing to be a duck or not, based on it | having the external appereance and outward activity of a | duck, and ignoring any further subleties, intent, | internal processes, qualia, and so on. | | In other words, "it lies like a duck" means: if it | produces things that look like lies, it is lying, and we | don't care how it got to produce them. | | So, Chat-GPT absolutely does "lie like a duck". | throwaway675309 wrote: | Abductive reasoning aside, people are already | anthropomorphizing GPT enough without bringing in a | loaded word like "lying" which implies intent. | | Hallucinates is a far more accurate word. | Karellen wrote: | Lying implies intent, and knowing what the truth is. Saying | something you believe to be true, but is wrong, is | generally not considered a lie but a mistake. | | A better description of what ChatGPT does is described well | by one definition of bullshit: | | > bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard | for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to | hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is | true or false | | -- Harry Frankfurt, _On Bullshit_ , 2005 | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit | | ChatGPT neither knows nor cares what the truth is. If it | bullshits like a duck, it is a bullshitting duck. | emodendroket wrote: | You could say that calling it "lying" is unduly | anthropomorphizing the LLM, but then so is saying it | "believes" something to be true. | massysett wrote: | I've come to the belief that making statements that may | or may not be true, but with reckless disregard for | whether or not they actually are true, is indeed lying. | | Of course we know ChatGPT cannot lie like a human can, | but a big reason the thing exists is to assemble text the | same way humans do. So I think it's useful rhetorically | to say that ChatGPT, quite simply, lies. | coldtea wrote: | > _Lying implies intent, and knowing what the truth is. | Saying something you believe to be true, but is wrong, is | generally not considered a lie but a mistake._ | | Those are the semantics of lying. | | But "X like a duck" is about ignoring semantics, and | focusing not on intent or any other subtletly, but only | on the outward results (whether something has the | external trappings of a duck). | | So, if it produces things that look like lies, then it is | lying. | Karellen wrote: | A person who is mistaken looks like they're lying. That | doesn't mean they're actually lying. | | That's the thing people are trying to point out. You | can't look at something that looks like it's lying and | conclude that it's lying, because _intent is an intrinsic | part_ of what it means to lie. | coldtea wrote: | Even for that, you'd be surprised: | | (1) get oneself into or out of a situation by lying. "you | lied your way on to this voyage by implying you were an | experienced crew" | | (2) (of a thing) present a false impression. "the camera | cannot lie" | Karellen wrote: | 1) sounds like intent is present there? | | 2) "the camera cannot lie" - cameras have no intent? | | I feel like I'm missing something from those definitions | that you're trying to show me? I don't see how they | support your implication that one can ignore intent when | identifying a lie. (It would help if you cited the source | you're using.) | grt_thr wrote: | Ironically enough this sounds exactly like how bing was | justifying it's gas lighting before it got lobotomised. | unusualmonkey wrote: | > So, if it produces things that look like lies, then it | is lying. | | Lying depends upon context. | User23 wrote: | Right. Technically speaking ChatGPT bullshitted[1]. It can | only bullshit. It is entirely indifferent to truth or | falsehood and thus it can neither be honest nor lie. | | It is however an impressive bullshit generator. Even more | impressively, a decent amount of the bullshit it generates is | in fact true or otherwise correct. | | [1] using Frankfurt's definition that it is communication | that is completely indifferent to truth or falsehood. | grumple wrote: | "It doesn't lie, it just generates lies and printed them to | the screen!" | | I don't think there's a difference. | icedchai wrote: | There is a difference. Is fiction a lie? | wvenable wrote: | It's a text generator. You ask it generate something and it | does. It produces only stories. Sometimes those stories are | based on actual facts. | | This lawyer told it produce a defence story and it did just | that. | Bytewave81 wrote: | To perhaps stir the "what do words really mean" argument, | "lying" would generally imply some sort of conscious intent | to bend or break the truth. A language model is not | consciously making decisions about what to say, it is | statistically choosing words which probabilistically sound | "good" together. | coldtea wrote: | > _A language model is not consciously making decisions | about what to say_ | | Well, that is being doubted -- and by some of the biggest | names in the field. | | Namely that it isn't "statistically choosing words which | probabilistically sound good together". But that doing so | is not already making a consciousness (even if basic) | emerge. | | > _it is statistically choosing words which | probabilistically sound "good" together._ | | That when we do speak (or lie), we do something much more | nuanced, and not just do a higher level equivalent of the | same thing, plus have the emergent illusion of | consciousness, is also an idea thrown around. | mensetmanusman wrote: | "Well, that is being doubted -- and by some of the | biggest names in the field." | | An appeal to authority is still a fallacy. We don't even | have a way of proving if a person is conscious, why would | anyone expect we could agree if a machine is. | coldtea wrote: | > _An appeal to authority is still a fallacy_ | | Which is neither here, nor there. I wasn't making a | formal argument, I was stating a fact. Take it or leave | it. | raincole wrote: | Saying ChatGPT lies is like saying The Onion lies. | ceejayoz wrote: | The Onion (via its staff) intends to produce falsehoods. | ChatGPT (nor its staff) does not. | acka wrote: | Does a piece of software with a bug in it which causes it | to produce incorrect output lie or is it simply a | programming error? Did the programmer who wrote the buggy | code lie? I don't think so. | mod50ack wrote: | Lying implies an intention. ChatGPT doesn't have that. | | What ChatGPT definitely does do is generate falsehoods. | It's a bullshitting machine. Sometimes the bullshit | produces true responses. But ChatGPT has no epistemological | basis for knowing truths; it just is trained to say stuff. | lo_zamoyski wrote: | And if you want to be pedantic, ChatGPT isn't even | generating falsehoods. A falsehood requires propositional | content and therefore intentionality, but ChatGPT doesn't | have that. It merely generates strings that, when | interpreted by a human being _as_ English text, signify | falsehoods. | mod50ack wrote: | Getting into the weeds, but I don't agree with this | construal of what propositional content is or can be. | (There is no single definition of "proposition" which has | wide acceptance and specifies your condition here.) There | is no similar way to assess truth outside of formalized | mathematics, but the encoding of mathematical statements | (think Godel numbers) comes to mind; I don't think that | the ability of the machine to understand propositions is | necessary in order to make the propositions | propositional; the system of ChatGPT is designed in order | to return propositional content (albeit not ex nihilo, | but according to the principles of its design) and this | could be considered analogous to the encoding of | arithmetical symbolic notation into an formally-described | system. The difference is just that we happen to have a | formal description of how some arithmetic systems | operate, which we don't (and I would say can't) have for | English. Mild throwback to my university days studying | all of this! | zdragnar wrote: | The difference is everything. It doesn't understand intent, | it doesn't have a motivation. This is no different than | what fiction authors, songwriters, poets and painters do. | | The fact that people assume what it produces must always be | real because it is sometimes real is not its fault. That | lies with the people who uncritically accept what they are | told. | hoistbypetard wrote: | > That lies with the people who uncritically accept what | they are told. | | That's partly true. Just as much fault lies with the | people who market it as "intelligence" to those who | uncritically accept what they are told. | williamcotton wrote: | This is displayed directly under the input prompt: | | _ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about | people, places, or facts._ | hoistbypetard wrote: | That's a good start. I think it needs to be embedded in | the output. | Dalewyn wrote: | An exceedingly complicated Autocomplete program, which an | "AI" like ChatGPT is, does not have motives, does not know | the concept of "lying" (nor any concept thereof), and | simply does things as ordered by its user. | japoco wrote: | Lying needs intent. ChatGPT does not think therefore it | doesn't lie in that sense. | leereeves wrote: | Merriam-Webster gives two definitions for the verb "lie". | The first requires intent, the second does not: | | > to create a false or misleading impression | | > _Statistics sometimes lie._ | | > _The mirror never lies._ | joe_the_user wrote: | This is an interesting discussion. The ideas of | philosophy meet the practical meaning of words here. | | You can reasonably say a database doesn't lie. It's just | a tool, everyone agrees it's a tool and if you get the | wrong answer, most people would agree it's your fault for | making the wrong query or using the wrong data. | | But the difference between ChatGPT and a database is | ChatGPT will support it's assertions. It will say things | that support it's position - not just fake references but | an entire line of argument. | | Of course, all of this is simply duplicating/simulating | for humans in discussions. You can call it is a | "simulated lie" if you don't like the idea of it really | lying. But I claim that in normal usage, people will take | this as "real" lying and ultimately that functional | meaning is what "higher" more philosophical will have to | accept. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Thats like saying robots don't murder - they just kill | fallingknife wrote: | Which is actually a very good analogy. A lot of things | can kill you, but only a human can be a murderer. | NotACop182 wrote: | And pit bulls, but I digress. The debate gets lost in | translation when we start having what do words mean | debate. | joe_the_user wrote: | In movies and written fiction, "intelligent" robots, | anthropomorphized animals, elves, dwarves and etc can all | commit murder when given the attributes of humans. | | We don't have real things with all human attributes but | we're getting closer and as we get close "needs to be a | human" will get thinner as an explanation of what is or | isn't human for an act of murder, deception and so-forth. | agnosticmantis wrote: | Whether a statement is true or false doesn't depend on the | mechanism generating the statement. We should hold these | models (or more realistically, their creators) to the same | standard as humans. What do we do with a human that generates | plausible-sounding sentences without regard for their truth? | Let's hold the creators of these models accountable, and | everything will be better. | flextheruler wrote: | That standard is completely impossible to reach based on | the way these models function. They're algorithms | predicting words. | | We treat people and organizations who gather data and try | to make accurate predictions with extremely high leniency. | It's common sense not to expect omnipotence. | throwaway675309 wrote: | No. What does this even mean? How would you make this | actionable? LLM's are not "fact retrieval machines", and | open AI is not presenting chat GPT as a legal case | database. In fact they already have many disclaimers | stating that GPT may provide information that is incorrect. | If humans in their infinite stupidity choose to disregard | these warnings, that's on them. | | Regulation is not the answer. | pseudo0 wrote: | It seems like the appropriate party has been held | responsible here - the lawyer who submitted false | statements without doing proper verification and due | diligence. This is no different than if the lawyer googled | "case law supporting XYZ", found some random blog, and | copy-pasted their citations without realizing they were | made up. | MattGaiser wrote: | > What do we do with a human that generates plausible- | sounding sentences without regard for their truth? | | Elect them as leaders? | icedchai wrote: | ChatGPT is perfect for generating company mission | statements, political rhetoric, and other forms of BS. | endofreach wrote: | I always wondered about the weird typo when people write | ,,GPT" but substitute the ,,P" and ,,T" with an ,,O" and | ,,D". | | Hail ChatGPT! | bobsmooth wrote: | >Let's hold the creators of these models accountable, and | everything will be better. | | Shall we hold Adobe responsible for people photoshopping | their ex's face into porn as well? | agnosticmantis wrote: | I don't think the marketing around photoshop and chatgpt | are similar. | | And that matters. Just like with self-driving cars, as | soon as we hold the companies accountable to their claims | and marketing, they start bringing the hidden footnotes | to the fore. | | Tesla's FSD then suddenly becomes a level 2 ADAS as | admitted by the company lawyers. ChatGPT becomes a | fiction generator with some resemblance to reality. Then | I think we'll all be better off. | joshjdr wrote: | I actually agree more with this comment more than after | my initial read. You suggest some valid concerns about | innovation that regulation could address. | | I guess the part I'm unsure about is the assertion about | the dissimilarity to Photoshop, or if the marketing is | the issue at hand. (E.g. did Adobe do a more appropriate | job marketing with respect to conveying that their | software is designed for the editing, but not doctoring, | or falsifying facts?) | majormajor wrote: | I think ChatGPT and Photoshop are both "designed for" the | creation of novel things. | | In Photoshop, though, the intent is clearly up to the | user. If you edit that photo, you know you're editing the | photo. | | That's fairly different than ChatGPT where you ask a | question and this product has been trained to answer you | in a highly-confident way that makes it _sound like_ it | actually knows more than it does. | emodendroket wrote: | Maybe we should if they were trying to make something | completely different and that was the output | flangola7 wrote: | ChatGPT isn't a legal entity but OpenAI is, and Altman has | already recommend to Congress that coming regulations should | make AI companies liable for produced text and be 230 exempt. | | I can see it already happening even without legislation, 230 | shields liability from user-generated content but ChatGPT | output isn't user generated. It's not even a recommendation | algorithm steering you into other users' content telling why | you should kill yourself - the company itself produced the | content. If I was a judge or justice that would be cut and | dry to me. | | Companies with AI models need to treat the models as if they | were an employee. If your employee starts giving confidently | bad legal advice to customers, you need to nip that in the | bud or you're going to have a lot of problems. | shagie wrote: | Why should OpenAI be more liable for a tool that they've | created than any other tool creator where the tool is | intentionally misused and warnings on the tool ignored? | | If I wrote text in Microsoft Word and in doing so, I had a | typo in (for example) the name of a drug that Word | corrected to something that was incorrect, is Microsoft | liable for the use of autocorrect? | | If I was copying and pasting data into excel and some of it | was interpreted as a date rather than some other data | format resulting in an incorrect calculation that I didn't | check at the end, is Microsoft again liable for that? | | At the bottom of the ChatGPT page, there's the text: | ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, | places, or facts. | | If I can make an instance of Eliza say obscene or incorrect | things, does that make the estate of Weizenbaum liable? | whitemary wrote: | > _It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing | a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high | probability the constraints of the model._ | | This is exactly the sort of behavior that produces many of | the lies that humans tell everyday. The "constraints of the | model" are synonymous with the constraints of a person's | knowledge of the world (which is their model). | smrtinsert wrote: | Exactly. ChatGPT describes a universe recreated using | probabilities. Caveat emptor. | nemo44x wrote: | Correct. ChatGPT is a _bullshitter_ , not a liar. A | bullshitter isn't concerned with facts or truth or anything. | A liar is concerned with concealing the truth. | | Bullshitters are actually probably worse than liars because | at least liars live in the same reality as honest people. | whitemary wrote: | Liars (humans) are often unconcerned with facts or truth | either. More often these days, they are only concerned with | profit. Are unconfirmed lies in the pursuit of mere profit | somehow not lies? | nemo44x wrote: | This book [1] covers it. | | [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit#:~:text=T | he%20li.... | whitemary wrote: | No, it does not. | awesome_dude wrote: | Yes, and this points to the real problem that permeates through | a lot of our technology. | | Computers are dealing with a reflection of reality, not reality | itself. | | As you say AI has no understanding that double-check has an | action that needs to take place, it just knows that the words | exist. | | Another big and obvious place this problem is showing up is | Identity Management. | | The computers are only seeing a reflection, the information | associated with our identity, not the physical reality of the | identity (and that's why we cannot secure ourselves much | further than passwords, MFA is really just "more information | that we make harder to emulate, but is still just bits and | bytes to the computer, the origin is impossible for it to | ascertain). | [deleted] | [deleted] | jiggawatts wrote: | There are systems built _on top of_ LLMs that can reach out to | a vector database or do a keyword search as a plug in. There's | already companies selling these things, backed by databases of | real cases. These work as advertised. | | If you go to ChatGPT and just ask it, you'll get the equivalent | of asking Reddit: a decent chance of someone writing you some | fan-fiction, or providing plausible bullshit for the lulz. | | The real story here isn't ChatGPT, but that a lawyer did the | equivalent of asking online for help and then didn't bother to | cross check the answer before submitting it to a judge. | | ...and did so while ignore the disclaimer that's there _every | time_ warning users that answers may be hallucinations. A | lawyer. Ignoring a four-line disclaimer. _A lawyer!_ | ComputerGuru wrote: | > If you go to ChatGPT and just ask it, you'll get the | equivalent of asking Reddit: a decent chance of someone | writing you some fan-fiction, or providing plausible bullshit | for the lulz. | | I disagree. A layman can't troll someone from the industry | let alone a subject matter expert but ChatGPT can. It knows | all the right shibboleths, appears to have the domain | knowledge, then gets you in your weak spot: individual | plausible facts that just aren't true. Reddit trolls | generally troll "noobs" asking entry-level questions or other | readers. It's like understanding why trolls like that exist | on Reddit but not StackOverflow. And why SO has a hard ban on | AI-generated answers: because the existing controls to defend | against that kind of trash answer rely on sniff tests that | ChatGPT passes handily until put to actual scrutiny. | ytreacj wrote: | [dead] | jonplackett wrote: | If they wanted a 'double' check then perhaps also check | yourself? I'm sure it would have been trivially easy to check | this was a real case. | | I heard someone describe the best things to ask ChatGPT to do | are things that are HARD to do, but EASY to check. | Buttons840 wrote: | GPT4 can double-check to an extent. I gave it a sequence of 67 | letter As and asked it to count them. It said "100", I said | "recount": 98, recount, 69, recount, 67, recount, 67, recount, | 67, recount, 67. It converged to the correct count and stayed | there. | | This is quite a different scenario though, tangential to your | [correct] point. | kordlessagain wrote: | The example of asking it things like counting or sequences | isn't a great one because it's been solved by asking it to | "translate" to code and then run the code. I took this up as | a challenge a while back with a similar line of reasoning on | Reddit (that it couldn't do such a thing) and ended up | implementing it in my AI web shell thing. | heavy-magpie|> I am feeling excited. system=> History | has been loaded. pastel-mature-herring~> !calc how many | Ns are in nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn heavy-magpie|> Writing | code. // filename: synth_num_ns.js // version: | 0.1.1 // description: calculate number of Ns var | num_ns = 'nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn'; var num_Ns = | num_ns.length; Sidekick("There are " + num_Ns + " Ns in | " + num_ns + "."); heavy-magpie|> There are 20 Ns in | nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. | mikestew wrote: | Shouldn't the answer be zero? | einpoklum wrote: | But would GPT4 actually check something it had not checked | the first time? Remember, telling the truth is not a | consideration for it (and probably isn't even modeled), just | saying something that would typically be said in similar | circumstances. | simonw wrote: | Only in as much as there's an element of randomness to the | way GPT responds to a prompt - so you can re-run | effectively the same prompt and get a different result | depending on the outcome of several hundred billion | floating point calculations with a random seed thrown in. | simonw wrote: | Yeah, that was my conclusion too: | | _What's a common response to the question "are you sure you | are right?"--it's "yes, I double-checked". I bet GPT-3's | training data has huge numbers of examples of dialogue like | this._ | jimsimmons wrote: | They should RLHF this behaviour out. | | Asking people to be aware of limitations is in similar vein | as asking them to read ToC | coffeebeqn wrote: | If the model could tell when it was wrong it would be GPT-6 | or 7. I think the best 4 could do is maybe it can detect | when things enter the realm of the factual or mathematical | etc and use a external service for that part | jimsimmons wrote: | You have no basis to make that claim. | | My point was a lot more subtle: if someone asks things | like "double check it", "are you sure" you can provide a | template "I'm just a LM" response. | | I'm not expecting the model to know what it doesn't know. | I'm not sure some future GPT variant can either | fortyseven wrote: | The chat thread we are currently engaging in will most likely | be inside a model within the next year, too. | | (Fortyseven is an alright dude.) | la64710 wrote: | ChatGPT did exactly what it is supposed to do. The lawyers who | cited them are fools in my opinion. Of course OpenAI is also an | irresponsible company to enable such a powerful technology | without adequate warnings. With each chatGPT response they | should provide citations (like Google does) and provide a | clearly visible disclaimer that what it just spewed may be | utter BS. | | I only hope the judge passes an anecdotal order for all AI | companies to include the above mentioned disclaimer with each | of their responses. | mulmen wrote: | The remedy here seems to be expecting lawyers to do their | jobs. Citations would be nice but I don't see a reason to | legislate that requirement, especially from the bench. Let | the market sort this one out. Discipline the lawyers using | existing mechanisms. | jprete wrote: | There's no possible adequate warning for the current state of | the technology. OpenAI could put a visible disclaimer after | every single answer, and the vast majority would assume it | was a CYA warning for purely legal purposes. | lolinder wrote: | I have to click through a warning on ChatGPT on every | session, and every new chat comes primed with a large set of | warnings about how it might make things up and please verify | everything. | | It's not that there aren't enough disclaimers. It just turns | out plastering warnings and disclaimers everywhere doesn't | make people act smarter. | leereeves wrote: | In the other discussion of this topic, a lot of people said the | lawyer should be disbarred, but personally I think people should | be able to trust the tools marketed by trillion dollar tech | companies, and a lot of the blame should be placed on | Microsoft/OpenAI for overhyping ChatGPT and understating how | likely it is to mislead. | | And every response from ChatGPT should be preceded by a warning | that it cannot be trusted. | LelouBil wrote: | There is a warning each time you create a new thread, and | always at the bottom of the page. | | I think people should check (on the same page as the tool | itself) if the tool advertises itself as unreliable. | simonw wrote: | > _And every response from ChatGPT should be preceded by a | warning that it cannot be trusted._ | | It kind of is - the ChatGPT site has this as a permanent | fixture in the footer: | | > _ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, | places, or facts._ | | That's arguably ineffective though - even lawyers evidently | don't read the small print in the footer! | leereeves wrote: | Worse, it's buried in the middle of other fine print: | | > Free Research Preview. ChatGPT may produce inaccurate | information about people, places, or facts. ChatGPT May 24 | Version | | And it really understates the problem. It should say: | _Warning! ChatGPT is very likely to make shit up._ | bobsmooth wrote: | It's right there on the home page under "Limitations" | | "May occasionally generate incorrect information" | | Everyone knows gasoline is flammable but there's still people | that smoke while filling their gas tank. | rsynnott wrote: | Monty Python nicely addressed this, over 50 years ago. | | > Mr. Hilton: Oh, we use only the finest juicy chunks of | fresh Cornish ram's bladder, emptied, steamed, flavoured with | sesame seeds, whipped into a fondue, and garnished with | lark's vomit. | | > Inspector: LARK'S VOMIT?!?!? | | > Mr. Hilton: Correct. | | > Inspector: It doesn't say anything here about lark's vomit! | | > Mr. Hilton: Ah, it does, on the bottom of the box, after | 'monosodium glutamate'. | | > Inspector: I hardly think that's good enough! I think it's | be more appropriate if the box bore a great red label: | 'WARNING: LARK'S VOMIT!!!' | | > Mr. Hilton: Our sales would plummet! | | https://youtu.be/3zZQQijocRI | | Really, it should open every conversation with "by the way, I | am a compulsive liar, and nothing I say can be trusted". That | _might_ get through to _some_ users. | throwaway675309 wrote: | Humor aside I disagree. They are basically three types of | people, the one who learns by reading, if you learn by | observation, the rest just have to pee on the electric | fence for themselves. | ajuc wrote: | Especially lawyers. | | Half the job of lawyers is making people add useless warnings | to everything that then everybody ignore. | | May contain sesame. Your mileage may vary. All the characters | are fictional. | [deleted] | hristov wrote: | It is very concerning how people are anthropomorphizing chat gpt. | It will get a lot of people into trouble. The media is largely to | blame for this. Never mind most gushing media stories about AI, | even the few stories criticizing AI treat it as a human. Chat GPT | is racist, they say, it is sexist or a liar. | | Well it is neither of these things, because all of the above | require consciousness and intent and it has none. It is not | human, it is not any type of conscious being, do not treat it as | such. | | It sticks together sentences based on existing language scanned | in from the internet and millions of other sources. What it says | depends on what someone else said sometime ago on some random | forum on the internet, or some book or some other source stored | in an available database. It is also programmed to sound | extremely sure of itself, unless you flat out say it is | incorrect, in which case it will immediately admit fault and | apologize. Thus, asking it if it is sure is pointless. | | Let me tell you a less disastrous and quite a bit funnier story. | A friend of mine used chat GPT for coding. My friend became | really trustful of chat gpts coding prowess and asked it if it | could just send him the code in file form, so he did not have to | worry about copying and pasting which apparently screwed up the | formatting somehow. Chat gpt helpfully told him that it could | send the code to github, and my friend could download the files | from there. My friend said, that is perfect. | | So chatgpt gave him a github account name and said find the file | it created for my friend was there. My friend looked but github | said that account had long ago been closed. My friend tried | variations of that account name with different capitalizations, | etc., but found nothing. | | He went back and complained to chat gpt. Chat gpt dutifully | apologized and sent him another account name. He again spends | time looking for the account and looking for variations, etc. | Again the account has been closed. | | This happened a couple of more times and in the end my friend | gave up and complained to me. "Why is chat GPT doing this to me? | Is it mocking me? Is it getting its kicks from sending me on | random wild goose chases?". | | I had to explain to him that no, chat gpt is not human, and it is | not mocking him. What probably happened is someone on some forum | asked someone else on that forum to provide him with code in | files. The responder then offered to put the files on github and | provided an account name. When my friend asked a similar | question, chat gpt matched up the questions and provided a | similar answer. When my friend said that a particular account did | not work, chat gpt scoured the web for other people mentioning | their github account names and provided some of those. | | So whenever you use chat gpt, remember that is mostly a glorified | search engine. It will spit out information it has found | somewhere that it calculates as matching your question. Do not | attribute intent, feelings or any type of conscience to it. | crooked-v wrote: | > information it has found somewhere | | I think it's worth noting here that, without plugins active, | ChatGPT doesn't 'find' anything - everything is just baked in | as a single giant blob of vector data. That's why it has a | specific date cutoff as to what it 'knows'. | bobsmooth wrote: | It's really disconcerting how many people don't understand that | these LLMs are programs not people. | einpoklum wrote: | So Picard lied to me ?! | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3CpHa4sUs | | https://memory- | alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Measure_Of_A_Man_(e... | ubj wrote: | > No, it did not "double-check"--that's not something it can do! | And stating that the cases "can be found on legal research | databases" is a flat out lie. What's harder is explaining why | ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM | companies have for shipping a model that does this? | | At what point does OpenAI (or any other company) become legally | responsible for this kind of behavior from their LLM's? I'm not | excusing the lawyer for their reckless and irresponsible use of a | tool they didn't understand, but it's becoming increasingly clear | that people are trusting LLM's far more than they should. | | In my opinion it's dangerous to keep experimenting on the general | population without holding the experimenters accountable for the | harm that occurs. | yarg wrote: | Never? | | Unless they advertise it as having the capability, it's got | nothing to do with them. | | If I hit someone with a hammer, that shit's on me, not the | manufacturer. | jeroenhd wrote: | > At what point does OpenAI (or any other company) become | legally responsible for this kind of behavior from their LLM's? | | When they sell their bots to areas where lying is illegal. | I.e., when a company pretends to do law. | | OpenAI doesn't pretend ChatGPT is a lawyer and for good reason. | The lawyer who decided to outsource his work is an idiot and | can't shift blame to the tool he decided to abuse. | bobsmooth wrote: | >At what point does OpenAI (or any other company) become | legally responsible for this kind of behavior from their LLM's? | | When AutoCAD is responsible for an architect's shitty design. | notatoad wrote: | OpenAI or any other company becomes liable when they market a | product to be used _in place of_ lawyers (or doctors, | engineers, or whatever other profession) | | as long as we're hiring professionals to do these jobs, part of | that real actual human's job is to accept the liability for | their work. if a person want to use a tool to make their job | easier, it's also their job to make sure that the tool is | working properly. if the human isn't capable of doing that, | then the human doesn't need to be involved in this process at | all - we can just turn the legal system over to the LLMs. but | for me, i'd prefer the humans were still responsible. | | in this case, "the experimenter" was the lawyer who chose to | use ChatGPT for his work, not OpenAI for making the tool | available. and yes, i agree, the experimenter should be held | accountable. | dataviz1000 wrote: | Do the machines in the Matrix lie? | nine_k wrote: | We can hope to start to actually _rely_ on such models once they | start learning not only in the language domain, but also in the | epistemic domain. True vs false, known vs unknown, precise vs | vague, agreement vs contradiction vs unrelated, things like that. | | Achieving that is going to be a serious technical, and also | philosophical, challenge for humans. | | Today's LLM are a literary device. They say what sounds plausible | in the universe of texts they were fed. What they say technically | isn't even wrong, because they have no notion of truth, or any | notion of a world beyond the words. Their output should be judged | accordingly. | macrael wrote: | Genuine question: why have these models all been trained to sound | so confident? Is it not possible to have rewarded models that | announced their own ignorance? Or is even that question belying | an "intelligence" view of these models that isn't accurate? | crooked-v wrote: | The problem is that the model doesn't know if anything it's | saying is true or false, so trying to make it 'fact check' just | means it will constantly interrupt itself regardless of the | accuracy of the output. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | I think you are confusing ChatGPT with AI. ChatGPT is a | statistical fiction generator. It sounds confident because it | is writing fiction. It sounds confident for precisely the same | reason that billions of ignorant people world wide post "facts" | on line sound confident: they are incapable of understanding | their ignorance. They are just systems that have inputs and | then generate outputs. | tiahura wrote: | Chatgpt did this to me the other day. It gave me the right answer | about passenger assumption of risk with drunk driver, but the | cites were imagined. | londons_explore wrote: | If I were the judge in this case, I would be looking to throw | this lawyer in prison for a month, and ban him from ever being a | lawyer again... | | Deliberately lying to the court, as a professional who should | understand the consequences, in a way likely to not be detected, | and likely to change the outcome of the case, ought to be met | with a really strict punishment. | kevinpet wrote: | It's not clear he deliberately lied. He plausibly misunderstood | a new tool he had recently been introduced to. | basilgohar wrote: | I am curious if an architect or an engineer did this for a | design and submitted this, would we extend to them the same | "reasonable" explanation and excuse, especially if someone's | life was put on the line. | | Interestingly, it's exactly the same in court! People's lives | are put on the line all the time, and lawyers also sometimes | flat out lie. This just further indicts the current legal | system because it doesn't really "work" but it's just that | the mistakes are often covered-up enough until most people | forget about them and move on to something else. | mod50ack wrote: | As a lawyer, though, he has a responsibility for the contents | of his filings. And there are legal standards for how to | research and verify these things -- which he didn't follow. | astrea wrote: | And he didn't bother to verify the facts before he presented | them in court? That's scientifically/logically/professionally | unsound and irresponsible. | konschubert wrote: | But it's not deliberately lying | roywiggins wrote: | If you sign you name under "I declare under penalty of | perjury that the foregoing is true and correct." then you | absolutely have an obligation to check that your facts | are correct. | DangitBobby wrote: | Then no one would ever sign. That's why it says "to the | best of my knowledge" as part of the statement. | zouhair wrote: | Punishment is not technically the point of prisons. Your | unhinged comment will pass as normal to so many people who | think punishment is the point and that's scary as hell. | projectileboy wrote: | At least in the US, I would argue your reply is not totally | correct. The US has a long history of not really knowing if | it wants prison to be punishment, rehabilitation, or both. | noahlt wrote: | Punishment is absolutely one purpose of prisons. Your | unhinged comment will pass as normal to many people who don't | believe in retribution, and that's why you all belong in | Hell. | shon wrote: | The judge may not be amused, but we are. | Kim_Bruning wrote: | Current LLM workflow is the epitome of "trust but verify". | | You need to hand-verify at some point in the process. | | This does end up losing you some of the time you gained by using | an LLM in the first place. Fortunately you often do still come | out ahead. | CPLX wrote: | Honestly it's the opposite. I go with don't trust at all, | extract everything that saves you time. | | It's just not a source of truth at all, it's a source of raw | material. | metadat wrote: | Discussed today: | | _A man sued Avianca Airline - his lawyer used ChatGPT_ | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36095352 (100 comments) | dpifke wrote: | Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36092509 | metadat wrote: | Thanks! Macro-expanded: | | _ChatGPT-Authored Legal Filing "Replete with Citations to | Non-Existent Cases "_ | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36092509 (67 comments, 1 | day ago) | _Microft wrote: | dang is doing that frequently - but what does "macro- | expanded" mean for normal users? Do you have a bookmarklet, | extension or something similar for this or is there any | secret incantation that makes HN generate such an entry | automatically? | metadat wrote: | I just do it manually.. I've gotten pretty efficient at | it, takes only a moment. | | Imo including title, timeline / age, and comment volume | provides helpful context to readers (I always appreciate | when others do this, rather than, in the most severe | cases, leaving a wall of unadorned HN links). | | Cheers _Microft (and cool username, btw ;D) | _Microft wrote: | Thanks for shedding light on this and thanks for the | compliment! Have a nice day | rsynnott wrote: | See, this is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the | current AI hype (well, that, plus it's largely the same people | who were going on about cryptocurrency changing the world a few | years ago); this stuff just isn't very _useful_. Like, if writing | plausible lies is the 2020s AI boom's killer app, well, that's | not great, really. | simonw wrote: | I disagree. | | I've been tracking the many, many flaws in AI pretty closely (I | wrote this article, and a bunch more in this series: | https://simonwillison.net/series/llm-misconceptions/) | | And yet... I'm finding ChatGPT and the like _wildly_ useful on | a personal level. | | I think they're deceptively hard to use: you have to put in | effort to learn them, and to learn how to avoid the many traps | they set for you. | | But once you've done that you can get very real productivity | boosts from them. I use ChatGPT a dozen or so times a day, and | I would be very sad to not have access to it any more. | | I wrote a bit more about that here: | https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen... | - and if anything this effect has got even stronger for me over | the two months since I wrote that. | isp wrote: | Well put. | | I stand by this comment: | | > Catch-all comment for all ChatGPT use cases: | | > (1) Stunning tech demo, a vision of the future today | | > ... yet ... | | > (2) There are so many sharp edges that I'm not brave | (foolhardy?) enough to blindly trust the output | | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35068386) | whimsicalism wrote: | You will see :) | jeroenhd wrote: | Current AI is very useful in cases where the truth isn't very | important. It's amazing for things like fantasy stories, video | games. It also works in cases where existing tools can validate | the bullshit AI generates (i.e. Copilot). | | In cases where facts and sources are important, AI cannot be | trusted. You can use it as long as you validate every single | word it outputs, but at that point I do wonder what the point | of using AI was in the first place. | | It's also good at taking other existing work and creating new | work out of it; not just for smart autocomplete tools like | GPTs, but also for things like Stable Diffusion. Again, AI is | incapable of attribution of sources, so that comes with obvious | downsides, but in cases where the creator of the model have the | necessary rights so they don't _need_ attribution to sell work | (i.e. stock photo companies), it can be quite useful for | generating things like filler images. | garganzol wrote: | AI is definitely useful for creative fields. Take a look at the | recent "generative fill" feature from Adobe, just watch that | video. AI is also super useful for math and programming - | because it gives ideas. They may be flawed a bit, they may miss | crucial details, but sometimes that creative hallucinating | perspective is all you need to get the job done. | shakow wrote: | IMHO, like many brand new technologies, the I hype is | overhyped, but will still reduce to many useful things when the | dust will have settled down. | | Just like we had no free ambient electricity in 1890, no flying | cars in 1950, and not talking robots in 1980, we still have a | very robust electricity network, a car per household, and | automated assembly lines. | kordlessagain wrote: | This is why it is very important to have the prompts fill in | relevant fragments from a quality corpus. That people think these | models "tell the truth" or "hallucinate" is only half the story. | It's like expecting your language center to know all the facts | your visual consciousness contains, or your visual consciousness | to be able to talk in full sentences. It's only when all models | are working well together the truth emerges. | metaphor wrote: | > _That people think these models "tell the truth" or | "hallucinate" is only half the story._ | | A meta-problem here is in choosing to use descriptive phrases | like _tell the truth_ and _hallucinate_ , which are human | conditions that further anthropomorphize technology with no | agency, making it more difficult for layman society to defend | against its inherent fallibility. UX = | P_Success*Benefit - P_Failure*Cost | | It's been well over a decade since I learned of this deviously | simple relationship from UX expert Johnny Lee, and yet with | every new generation of tech that has hit the market since, | it's never surprising how the hype cycle results in a brazen | dismissal of the latter half. | [deleted] | manquer wrote: | Everyone is talking about ChatGPT , but is it not possible to | train a model with only actual court documents and keep "temp" | low and get accuracy levels as high or better than humans? | | Most legal (all formal really) documents are very predictably | structured and should be easy to generate ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-27 23:00 UTC)