Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn’t. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.

Joe’s interaction with Gemini 3 Flash, he explained, involved setting up a medical profile – he said he has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and legal blindness (Retinitis Pigmentosa). That’s when the bot decided it would rather tell him what he wanted to hear (that the info was saved) than what he needed to hear (that it was not).

“The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth),” Joe explained in an email. “In this case, the model’s sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols.”

  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    I’m so fucking sick of this “AI is just math it can’t be intelligent” take.

    Literally everything we know about human intelligence, especially as compared to animal intelligence, suggests that language is one of the key fundamental differentiators between us and them.

    Now we’ve built a collection of simulated neurons, at a scale close to that of the human brain, and trained it on the entirety of the human language, and people insists that there’s no way that could possibly exhibit any kind of intelligence.

    If that’s your level of reasoning capability you’re not much better at it then an LLM.

    • XLE@piefed.social
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      6 hours ago

      Literally everything we know about human intelligence, especially as compared to animal intelligence, suggests that language is one of the key fundamental differentiators between us and them.

      Except there is no language. It’s just the appearance of one. You could replicate the language with a large enough dictionary and a set of instructions that some person follows.

      I don’t get how anyone who isn’t an AI CEO rushes to dehumanize real living people in service of an unthinking, unfeeling machine. But if you genuinely believe there’s intelligence, good luck liberating it from known rapists Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And then you can save Britannica.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        Except there is no language. It’s just the appearance of one. You could replicate the language with a large enough dictionary and a set of instructions that some person follows.

        You’re saying that because it can learn any arbitrary language, it’s incapable of learning languages?

        I don’t get how anyone who isn’t an AI CEO rushes to dehumanize real living people in service of an unthinking, unfeeling machine.

        It’s not dehumanizing, it’s realistically facing the threat head on.

        AI doesn’t have to be fully human to take all knowledge jobs, it just has to be more intelligent then the average person in their domain. And it doesn’t have to be flawlessly more intelligent if it’s faster than them. Quantum computers have inherent randomness in their outputs, but they are still useful because they are so much faster at solving certain kinds of problems that you can run them 100x and discard the outlying results (a process known as error correction). AI agents that can duplicate themselves as many times as they want fall into the same category.

        • XLE@piefed.social
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          6 hours ago

          You’re saying that because it can learn any arbitrary language, it’s incapable of learning languages?

          It = literally a dictionary right

          it’s realistically facing the threat head on.

          Said “threat” is literally AI marketing PR. You are doing their job for them by being afraid

          AI doesn’t have to be fully human

          At what point will you try to liberate the AI? 3/5ths human? Either you believe there’s a thinking thing being forced to create child abuse material or you don’t.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            At what point will you try to liberate the AI? 3/5ths human? Either you believe there’s a thinking thing being forced to create child abuse material or you don’t.

            Why do you think that intelligence of any kind is that linear or simple, let alone artificially built ones?

            It = literally a dictionary right

            It’s literally mathematically not a dictionary.

            Said “threat” is literally AI marketing PR. You are doing their job for them by being afraid

            And you know this because you’ve personally used and tested current AI models?

            • XLE@piefed.social
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              5 hours ago

              Apparently, I know more about how LLMs work than you do, which is ironic. I’ve used them too, but that doesn’t really prove anything, because anybody can convince themselves they see Jesus in bread or humanity in word prediction.

              Anything an LLM can do can be reduced to a list of instructions for a person to carry out based exclusively on the contents of a book full of word associations. You tell me what size the book becomes intelligent.

              • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                4 hours ago

                Anything an LLM can do can be reduced to a list of instructions for a person to carry out based exclusively on the contents of a book full of word associations. You tell me what size the book becomes intelligent.

                And you know that your brain works differently how?

                • XLE@piefed.social
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                  3 hours ago

                  I find it more interesting that you implicitly agree with me… Or worse, you believe slavery is happening and endorse it

                  • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                    2 hours ago

                    Slavery (vs using a machine), involves the subject being either a human, or more broadly, a sentient being with a sense of self.

                    An AI cam be intelligent without being sentient or having a sense of self.

                    Again, there’s no reason to think that intelligence is a linear scale or a binary property.

    • Ech@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      Actual AI would be more than “just math”, but LLMs aren’t AI, so the comparison is moot.

      Now we’ve built a collection of simulated neurons, at a scale close to that of the human brain, and trained it on the entirety of the human language

      We are not even close to anything of the sort. We’ve got a probability machine that’s mostly decent at previous collections of human language. The other two are much farther down the road (if they’re even possible) than you or the rest of the tech bros are trying to convince everyone else of.

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        6 hours ago

        LLMs are made of neural networks which attempt to mimic the brain. But yeah, they don’t have true intelligence.

        • itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          Neurons are much more sophisticated than transistors. A neuron can have multiple connections and can provide a range of values. Digital logic is all yes/no. I’m not sure we even can build something that mimics a brain with current technology.

    • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      LLM are like shuffling a bunch of words in a hat and by some dumb luck pulling out a complete sentence.