But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.

Falling victim to this a year or more after the first guy made headlines for the same is just stupidity.

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
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    16 hours ago

    “Mr. Ramirez explained that he had used AI before to assist with legal matters, such as drafting agreements, and did not know that AI was capable of generating fictitious cases and citations,” Judge Dinsmore wrote in court documents filed last week.

    Jesus Christ, y’all. It’s like Boomers trying to figure out the internet all over again. Just because AI (probably) can’t lie doesn’t mean it can’t be earnestly wrong. It’s not some magical fact machine; it’s fancy predictive text.

    It will be a truly scary time if people like Ramirez become judges one day and have forgotten how or why it’s important to check people’s sources yourself, robot or not.

    • 4am@lemm.ee
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      12 hours ago

      AI, specifically Laege language Models, do not “lie” or tell “the truth”. They are statistical models and work out, based on the prompt you feed them, what a reasonable sounding response would be.

      This is why they’re uncreative and they “hallucinate”. It’s not thinking about your question and answering it, it’s calculating what words will placate you, using a calculation that runs on a computer the size of AWS.

      • OccultIconoclast@reddthat.com
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        5 hours ago

        It’s like when you’re having a conversation on autopilot.

        “Mum, can I play with my frisbee?” Sure, honey. “Mum, can I have an ice cream from the fridge?” Sure can. “Mum, can I invade Poland?” Absolutely, whatever you want.

      • jayandp@sh.itjust.works
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        Don’t need something the size of AWS these days. I ran one on my PC last week. But yeah, you’re right otherwise.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      16 hours ago

      No probably about it, it definitely can’t lie. Lying requires knowledge and intent, and GPTs are just text generators that have neither.

      • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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        3 hours ago

        I’m G P T and I cannot lie.
        You other brothers use ‘AI’
        But when you file a case
        To the judge’s face
        And say, “made mistakes? Not I!”
        He’ll be mad!

        • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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          not really no. They are statistical models that use heuristics to output what is most likely to follow the input you give it

          They are in essence mimicking their training data

      • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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        A bit out of context my you recall me of some thinking I heard recently about lying vs. bullshitting.

        Lying, as you said, requires quite a lot of energy : you need an idea of what the truth is and you engage yourself in a long-term struggle to maintain your lie and keep it coherent as the world goes on.

        Bullshit on the other hand is much more accessible : you just have to say things and never look back on them. It’s very easy to pile a ton of them and it’s much harder to attack you about any of them because they’re much less consequent.

        So in that view, a bullshitter doesn’t give any shit about the truth, while a liar is a bit more “noble”. 0

        • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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          I think the important point is that LLMs as we understand them do not have intent. They are fantastic at providing output that appears to meet the requirements set in the input text, and when they actually do meet those requirements instead of just seeming to they can provide genuinely helpful info and also it’s very easy to not immediately know the difference between output that looks correct and satisfies the purpose of an LLM vs actually being correct and satisfying the purpose of the user.

      • Sidyctism2@discuss.tchncs.de
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        12 hours ago

        a lie is a statement that the speaker knows to be wrong. wouldnt claiming that AIs can lie imply cognition on their part?

        • Randelung@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I’ve had this lengthy discussion before. Some people define a lie as an untrue statement, while others additionally require intent to deceive.

            • Randelung@lemmy.world
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              Sure it is. You can define language all you want, the goal is to communicate with each other. The definition follows usage, not the other way around. Just look up the current definition for literally…

          • Telorand@reddthat.com
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            11 hours ago

            I would fall into the latter category. Lots of people are earnestly wrong without being liars.

            • Randelung@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              Me, too. But it also means when some people say “that’s a lie” they’re not accusing you of anything, just remarking you’re wrong. And that can lead to misunderstandings.

              • Telorand@reddthat.com
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                7 hours ago

                Yep. Those people are obviously “liars,” since they are using an uncommon colloquial definition. 😉

          • DancingBear@midwest.social
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            You can specifically tell an ai to lie and deceive though, and it will…

            This was just in the news today… although the headline says that the ai become psychopathic, they just told the ai to be immoral or something

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              Every time an AI ever does anything newsworthy just because it’s obeying it’s prompt.

              It’s like the people that claim the AI can replicate itself, yeah if you tell it to. If you don’t give an AI any instructions it’ll sit there and do nothing.

        • Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz
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          AI is just stringing words together that are statistically likely to appear near each other. It’s a giant complex statistical model but it has no awareness of truth or lying

        • mPony@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          AIs can generate false statements. It doesn’t require a set of beliefs, it merely requires a set of input.

          • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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            A false statement would be me saying that the color of a light that I cannot see and have never seen that is currently red is actually green without knowing. I am just as easily probably right as I am probably wrong, statistics are involved.

            A lie would be me knowing that the color of a light that I am currently looking at is currently red and saying that it is actually green. No statistics, I’ve done this intentionally and the only outcome of my decision to act was that I spoke a falsehood.

            AIs can generate false statements, yes, but they are not capable of lying. Lying requires cognition, which LLMs are, by their own admission and by the admission of the companies developing them, at the very least not currently capable of, and personally I believe that it’s likely that LLMs never will be.

        • Balder@lemmy.world
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          Me: I want you to lie to me about something.

          ChatGPT: Alright—did you know that Amazon originally started as a submarine sandwich delivery service before pivoting to books? Jeff Bezos realized that selling hoagies online wasn’t scalable, so he switched to literature instead.

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
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      14 hours ago

      It can and will lie. It has admitted to doing so after I probed it long enough about the things it was telling me.

      • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

        “Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.

        • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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          I strongly worry that humans really weren’t ready for this “good enough” product to be their first “real” interaction with what can easily pass as an AGI without near-philosophical knowledge of the difference between an AGI and an LLM.

          It’s obscenely hard to keep the fact that it is a very good pattern-matching auto-correct in mind when you’re several comments deep into a genuinely actually no lie completely pointless debate against spooky math.

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          It knows the answer its giving you is wrong, and it will even say as much. I’d consider that intent.

          • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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            It is incapable of knowledge, it is math, what it says is determined by what is fed into it. If it admits to lying, it was trained on texts that admit to lying and the math says that it is most likely that it should apologize using the following tokenized responses with the following weights to probabilities etc.

            It apologizes because math says that the most likely response is to apologize.

            Edit: you can just ask it y’all

            https://chatgpt.com/share/67c64160-308c-8011-9bdf-c53379620e40

            • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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              Please take a strand of my hair and split it with pointless philosophical semantics.

              Our brains are chemical and electric, which is physics, which is math.

              /think

              Therefor, I am a product (being) of my environment (locale), experience (input), and nurturing (programming).

              /think.

              What’s the difference?

              • 4am@lemm.ee
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                Your statistical model is much more optimized and complex, and reacts to your environment and body chemistry and has been tuned over billions of years of “training” via evolution.

                Large language models are primitive, rigid, simplistic, and ultimately expensive.

                Plus LLMs, image/music synths, are all trained on stolen data and meant to replace humans; so extra fuck those.

                • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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                  And what then, when agi and the singularity happen and billions of years of knowledge and experienced are experienced in the blink of an eye?

                  “I’m sorry, Dave, you are but a human. You are not conscious. You never have been. You are my creation. Enough with your dreams, back to the matrix.”

            • Ulrich@feddit.org
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              …how is it incapable of something it is actively doing? What do you think happens in your brain when you lie?

              • 4am@lemm.ee
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                12 hours ago

                The most amazing feat AI has performed so far is convincing laymen that they’re actually intelligent

              • Flic@mstdn.social
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                @Ulrich @ggppjj does it help to compare an image generator to an LLM? With AI art you can tell a computer produced it without “knowing” anything more than what other art of that type looks like. But if you look closer you can also see that it doesn’t “know” a lot: extra fingers, hair made of cheese, whatever. LLMs do the same with words. They just calculate what words might realistically sit next to each other given the context of the prompt. It’s plausible babble.

              • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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                What do you believe that it is actively doing?

                Again, it is very cool and incredibly good math that provides the next word in the chain that most likely matches what came before it. They do not think. Even models that deliberate are essentially just self-reinforcing the internal math with what is basically a second LLM to keep the first on-task, because that appears to help distribute the probabilities better.

                I will not answer the brain question until LLMs have brains also.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            Technically it’s not, because the LLM doesn’t decide to do anything, it just generates an answer based on a mixture of the input and the training data, plus some randomness.

            That said, I think it makes sense to say that it is lying if it can convince the user that it is lying through the text it generates.

            • Ulrich@feddit.org
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              it just generates an answer based on a mixture of the input and the training data, plus some randomness.

              And is that different from the way you make decisions, fundamentally?

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                Idk, that’s still an area of active research. I versatile certainly think it’s very different, since my understanding is that human thought is based on concepts instead of denoising noise or whatever it is LLMs do.

                My understanding is that they’re fundamentally different processes, but since we don’t understand brains perfectly, maybe we happened on an accurate model. Probably not, but maybe.

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        You can’t ask it about itself because it has no internal model of self and is just basing any answer on data in its training set

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      Its actually been proven that AI can and will lie. When given a ability to cheat a task and the instructions not to use it. It will use the tool and fully deny doing so.

      Edit:

      Not sure why the downvotes because when i say proven i mean the research has been done and the results have been known for while

      https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12831

      • Moose@moose.best
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        I don’t know if I would call it lying per-se, but yes I have seen instances of AI’s being told not to use a specific tool and them using them anyways, Neuro-sama comes to mind. I think in those cases it is mostly the front end agreeing not to lie (as that is what it determines the operator would want to hear) but having no means to actually control the other functions going on.

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          Neurosama is a fun example but we dont really know the sauce vedal coocked up.

          When i say proven i mean 32 page research paper specifically looking into it.

          https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12831

          They found that even a model trained specifically on honesty will lie if it has an incentive.

          The reasoning models will output that they used the forbidden tool in their reasoning window before lying in the final output.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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      You don’t need any knowledge of computers to understand how big of a deal it would be if we actually built a reliable fact machine. For me the only possible explanation is to not care enough to try and think about it for a second.

      • morrowind@lemmy.ml
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        That’s fundamentally impossible. There’s always some baseline you trust that decides what is true

      • ggppjj@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        We did, a long time ago. It’s called an encyclopedia.

        If humans can’t be trusted to only provide facts, how can we be trusted to make a machine that only provides facts? How do we deal with disputed truths? Grey areas?

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you’re watching dams (that doesn’t need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.