Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%
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Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
BatchJob · · focus · HN ↗
Your examples are contrived and will not be borne out in any significant way. Inaccuracies are usually not simply made up claims they are false information based on statistical paths to misleading results or which elude the current context. LLMS dont understand the word dont. LLMS dont understand the meaning of any words.
Neither you, nor aristotle nor god will ever make an LLM return the truth or correct results via prompting.
astrange · · focus · HN ↗
In what way do you understand the meaning of the word "unicorn" that an LLM does not? It has experienced exactly as many real unicorns as you have.
ASalazarMX · · focus · HN ↗
The concept, though, it's a very wide moat. You could call a unicorn "nyati" for all we care, we still know it's the concept of a magical flying horse with a single horn. We know, besides the literary corpus, the concepts of magic, horse, flying, and horns. It's fictional, yet we have a very good idea of what if would sound, feel, or even smell like. Ask an LLM to describe what a unicorn feels like, and it will ramble about forests and sparkles.
In fact, I asked Gemini (thinking, to see the process) to describe a mindful experience about meeting an unicorn in real life, and it did ramble about the event. When I reminded it about mindfulness being about experiencing with all your senses, and asked it to focus on the creature, to its credit, it even described the taste:
> Taste: Even the air surrounding the creature tastes different on your tongue—thin, crisp, and tinged with a faint, sweet metallic tang, like snow melting on limestone or fresh rain falling through high canopy.
Still nonsense, as a unicorn (or the air around it) will likely taste like horse, whatever that flavor is. It finishes with more nonsense, and I doubt the flash version will give better results.
> Every micro-detail of its anatomy becomes an anchor to the present moment. You are not thinking about what it means or where it came from; you are simply perceiving the texture, heat, sound, and weight of a living, breathing reality standing inches away.
Still, current LLMs can do amazing things given their inherent limitations, and that makes it easy for us to overestimate their capabilities.
astrange · · focus · HN ↗
I did try asking Gemini and Claude "what would a unicorn taste like" and got… acceptable and accurate answers, but the accurate answer maybe wasn't "acceptable", because I don't think a little girl asking Claude that question should have gotten a long description about what horse meat tastes like, like I did.
So there of course are issues where an LLM having explicit knowledge about something doesn't mean it has tacit knowledge about it in all contexts, but also hiring the LLM to do a job of being a helpful harmless chat assistant constrains its abilities.
(Gemini also points out a Starbucks unicorn drink doesn't taste like horses.)
ASalazarMX · · focus · HN ↗
astrange · · focus · HN ↗