Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up.
Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up.
The AI-generated false headline was promoted by X in its official trending news section.
A shocking story was promoted on the "front page" or main feed of Elon Musk's X on Thursday:
"Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles," read the headline.
This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran's embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.
But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.
Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X's own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X's trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.
People who deploy AI should be held responsible for the slander and defamation the AI causes.
Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.
Why I imagine Xitter lawyers arguing that was it was neither spoken nor "printed", they can't be charged?
Well if you read OpenAI's terms of service, there's an indemnification clause in there.
Basically if you get ChatGPT to say something defaming/libellous and then post it, you would foot the legal bill for any lawsuits that may arise from your screenshot of what their LLM produced.
I wonder how legislation is going to evolve to handle AI. Brazilian law would punish a newspaper or social media platform claiming that Iran just attacked Israel - this is dangerous information that could affect somebody's life.
If it were up to me, if your AI hallucinated some dangerous information and provided it to users, you're personally responsible. I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the "oh no you see it's impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee" and would actually fix this.
I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the "oh no you see it's impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee" and would actually fix this.
Nah, this problem is actually too hard to solve with LLMs. They don't have any structure or understanding of what they're saying so there's no way to write better guardrails.... Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.
So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. It's too cavalier. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it. Which also, probably just wouldn't happen.
Yep. To add on, this is exactly what all the "AI haters" (myself included) are going on about when they say stuff like there isn't any logic or understanding behind LLMs, or when they say they are stochastic parrots.
LLMs are incredibly good at generating text that works grammatically and reads like it was put together by someone knowledgable and confident, but they have no concept of "truth" or reality. They just have a ton of absurdly complicated technical data about how words/phrases/sentences are related to each other on a structural basis. It's all just really complicated math about how text is put together. It's absolutely amazing, but it is also literally and technologically impossible for that to spontaneously coelesce into reason/logic/sentience.
Turns out that if you get enough of that data together, it makes a very convincing appearance of logic and reason. But it's only an appearance.
You can't duct tape enough speak and spells together to rival the mass of the Sun and have it somehow just become something that outputs a believable human voice.
For an incredibly long time, ChatGPT would fail questions along the lines of "What's heavier, a pound of feathers or three pounds of steel?" because it had seen the normal variation of the riddle with equal weights so many times. It has no concept of one being smaller than three. It just "knows" the pattern of the "correct" response.
It no longer fails that "trick", but there's significant evidence that OpenAI has set up custom handling for that riddle over top of the actual LLM, as it doesn't take much work to find similar ways to trip it up by using slightly modified versions of classic riddles.
A lot of supporters will counter "Well I just ask it to tell the truth, or tell it that it's wrong, and it corrects itself", but I've seen plenty of anecdotes in the opposite direction, with ChatGPT insisting that it's hallucination was fact. It doesn't have any concept of true or false.
So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it.
Then you and I agree. If AI can be advertised as a source of information but at the same time can't provide safeguarded information, then there should not be commercial AI. Build tools to help video editing, remove backgrounds from photos, go nuts, but do not position yourself as a source of information.
Though if fixing AI is at all possible, even if we predict it will only happen after decades of technology improvements, it for sure won't happen if we are complacent and do not add such legislative restrictions.
Another of Musk cutting corners to the max and endangering lives but why should he care? He is in control and that is the only thing that matters to him, even if he loses billions of dollars.
To everyone that goes to "X" to get the "real", unfiltered news, I hope you can see that it's not that site anymore.
Yet, annoyingly, much of the press still uses it to disseminate news.
I understand journalism is in a rough spot these days and many are there against their will but something needs to change abruptly. This slow exodus is too slow for democracy to survive '24.
I'd argue it never was anything outside of pulling net celebs names from hats and claiming they were rapists and racists without evidence, and then having them get chased off the internet, destroying their careers in the process and in some cases causing suicides... Unless they actually did it, because then they were rich and could just buy good publicity or start an Alt-Right circle jerk where they can claim "Wokeness" did it.
It was never that site the FBI was literally using it for narrative control before Elon bought it
Not saying I like it now but Shit was pretty sketchy then too
it was the "yell at celebrities" website. The whole "buy a blue check" thing destroyed it.
"Grok" sounds like a name of a really stupid ork from a D&D capaign.
In case you're not familiar, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.
It's somewhat common slang in hacker culture, which of course Elon is shitting all over as usual. It's especially ironic since the meaning of the word roughly means "deep or profound understanding", which their AI has anything but.
Pretty sure its something from a Heilein book namely stranger from a strange world.
Gork is from Stranger in a Strange Land.
Grok smash!
Oh, what a surprise. Another AI spat out some more bullshit. I can't wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.
I can’t wait until companies finally give up on trying to do everything with AI.
I don't think that will ever happen.
They're acceptable of AI driving car accidents that causes harm happen. It's all part of the learning / debugging process to them.
Beware, terminally incompetent interns everywhere. Doing something incredibly damaging to your company over social media on your first day is officially a job that’s been taken by AI.
Something to do with Twitter and Elon was disinformation? I'm keeling over in shock.
I don't really understand this headline
The bot made it? So why was it promoted as trending?
It’s pretty, trending is based on . . . What’s trending by users.
Or as the article explains for those who can’t comprehend what trending means.
Based on our observations, it appears that the topic started trending because of a sudden uptick of blue checkmark accounts (users who pay a monthly subscription to X for Premium features including the verification badge) spamming the same copy-and-paste misinformation about Iran attacking Israel. The curated posts provided by X were full of these verified accounts spreading this fake news alongside an unverified video depicting explosions.
Amusingly Grok also spat a headline about how police were being deployed to shoot the earthquake after being exposed to a sarcastic tweet. https://i.imgur.com/qltkEsU.jpeg
Same similiar thing happened with major newspapers about 100 / 150 years ago ... governments realized that if any one group or company had control over all the information without regulation, businesses will quickly figure out ways to monetize information for the benefit of those with all the money and power. They then had to figure out how to start regulating newspapers and news media in order to maintain some sort of control and sanity to the entire system.
But like the newspapers of old .... no one will do anything about all this until it causes a major crisis or causes a terrible event ... or events.
In the meantime ... big corporations controlling 99% of all media and news information will stay unregulated or regulated as little as possible until terrible things happen and society breaks down.
Skynet has begun
Not to defend elon here but so what? Is it his job?
As CEO he is ultimately responsible for his platform. So yes, in the end it's his responsibility. It's why he gets paid the big bucks.
I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn't nearly ready for production. Often it's "do or get fired".
So... an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of "free speech" -- that's very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I'd say.
Was this some glitch in the matrix, then? (For reference: attack happened on 2024-04-14)
I'm wondering the same thing. Is this coincidence?
