It’s too easy to make AI chatbots lie about health information, study finds
It’s too easy to make AI chatbots lie about health information, study finds
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.
I sincerely hope people understand what LLMs are and what they're aren't. They're sophisticated search engines that aggregate results into natural language and refine results based on baked in prompts (in addition to what you provide), and if there are gaps, the LLM invents something to fill it.
If the model was trained on good data and the baked-in prompt is reasonable, you can get reasonable results. But even in the best case, there's still the chance that the LLM hallucinates something, that just how they work.
For most queries, I'm mostly looking for which search terms to use for checking original sources, or sometimes a reference to pull out something I already know, but am having trouble remembering (i.e. I will recognize the correct answer). For those use cases, it's pretty effective.
Don't use an LLM as a source of truth, use it as an aid for finding truth. Be careful out there!
Don't even use it as an aid for finding truth, it's just as likely, if not more, to give incorrect info
Why not? It's basically a search engine for whatever it was trained on. Yeah, it'll hallucinate sometimes, but if you're planning to verify anyway, it's pretty useful in quickly distilling ideas into concrete things to look up.
Meh. Google Gemini has given me great medical advice always couched carefully in “but check with your doctor.” and so on.
I was surprised too.
It's not 'lying' when they don't know the truth to begin with. They could be trying to answer accurately and it'd still be dangerous misinformation.
Not just health information. It is easy to make them LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING.