When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?
I’m just sick of you morons extending these comment threads out 5, 8, 20 fucking replies in defense of one of the shittiest things mankind has ever invented.
Yeah, Marcov Chains are truly the worst thing our species has produced!
Glad you have your priorities straight. It’s been fun talking to a chatbot instead of having a discussion like normal people. You can respond to this comment with whatever responses you want, just know that according to the things I’ve pretended you said, I’ve won the argument.