It’s too easy to make AI chatbots lie about health information, study finds (www.reuters.com)
from HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 04:03
https://sh.itjust.works/post/41374727

Well-known AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations from real medical journals, Australian researchers have found.

Without better internal safeguards, widely used AI tools can be easily deployed to churn out dangerous health misinformation at high volumes, they warned in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“If a technology is vulnerable to misuse, malicious actors will inevitably attempt to exploit it - whether for financial gain or to cause harm,” said senior study author Ashley Hopkins of Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health in Adelaide.

#world

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venusaur@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 04:32 next collapse

There should be a series of AI agents in place when a GPT is used. The agents intake the query and review the output before sending it off to the user.

madlian@lemmy.cafe on 02 Jul 06:25 next collapse

Who verifies the AI agent decisions?

truxnell@aussie.zone on 02 Jul 07:33 next collapse

More AI agents /s

brendansimms@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 14:43 collapse

its just ai agents all the way down

venusaur@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 15:15 collapse

The user. You could have the output include the “conversation” between the agents and validate the decisions. Not perfect, but better. People aren’t perfect either.

vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 Jul 08:36 collapse

what makes the checker models any more accurate?

perestroika@slrpnk.net on 02 Jul 09:51 next collapse

Possibly, reverse motivation - the training goal of such an agent would not be nice and smooth output, but shooting down misinformation.

But I have serious doubts about whether all of that is feasible, given the computational cost of running large language models.

vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 Jul 17:53 collapse

how does that stop the checker model from “hallucinating” a “yep, this is fine” when it should have said “nah, this is wrong”

venusaur@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 15:13 collapse

The checker models aren’t trying to give you a correct answer with confidence. Their purpose is to find an incorrect answer. They’ll both do their task with confidence.

vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 Jul 17:52 collapse

the first one was confident. But wrong. The second one could be just as confident and just as wrong.

venusaur@lemmy.world on 03 Jul 05:34 collapse

Sure but they’re doing opposite tasks. You’re absolutely right that they could be wrong sometimes. So are people. Over time it gets better, especially with more regulation and smarter models.

vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de on 03 Jul 12:02 collapse

opposite or not, they are both tasks that the fixed-matrix-multiplications can utterly fail at. It’s not a regulation thing. It’s a math thing: this cannot possibly work.

If you could get the checker to be correct all of the time, then you could just do that on the model it’s “checking” because it is literally the same thing, with the same failure modes, and the same lack of any real authority in anything it spits

venusaur@lemmy.world on 03 Jul 17:51 collapse

That’s not how it works though. It would be great if these AI models were deterministic but you can get different answers to the same questions at any given time. Given different input and given different goals, the agents wouldn’t likely fail on the same task when given proper instruction.

The main point is that it’s not going to be correct all the time. And neither is a human.

The regulation comes in when you’re dealing with sensitive information, like health diagnoses. There needs to be some logic in place to stop the models from being so confident with wrong answers that could hurt people.

Realistically, neither of us know what’s gonna work until we try it. Theoretically, verification agents would work.

vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de on 04 Jul 04:14 collapse

theoretically, they wouldn’t, and yes, that is how it works. The math says so.

BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca on 02 Jul 16:20 collapse

Isn’t it too easy for the current chatbots/LLMs to lie about everything?

Train it on garbage or in the wrong way, and it will agree on anything you want it to.

I asked DeepSeek about what to visit nearby and to give me some URLs and it hallucinated the URLs and places. Guess it wasn’t trained to know anything about my local area.