There are lots of articles about bad use cases of ChatGPT that Google already provided for decades.
Want to get bad medical advice for the weird pain in your belly? Google can tell you it’s cancer, no problem.
Do you want to know how to make drugs without a lab? Google even gives you links to stores where you can buy the materials for it.
Want some racism/misogyny/other evil content? Google is your ever helpful friend and garbage dump.
What’s the difference apart from ChatGPT’s inability to link to existing sources?
Edit: Just to clear things up. This post is specifically not about the new use cases that come from AI. Sure, Google cannot make semi-non-functional mini programs automatically, and Google will not write a fake paper in whole for me. I am specifically talking about the “This will change the world” articles, that mirror stuff that Google can do exactly like ChatGPT can.
The issue is that LLMs are fundamentally not able to not know something. Non-LLM filters that are strapped in front of an LLM can catch stuff like that (“As an LLM I am not able to…”), but if the request makes it through the filter, the LLM is not able to say “Sorry, I don’t know that”, because the data set doesn’t contain that.
For example, there aren’t a lot of API documentations that contain a “Sorry, I don’t know how this endpoint works”.
Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.
Getting reliable information out of an LLM is almost impossible.
The hallucinations look so real, that to spot them, you need to already know the correct answer. And if you know the correct answer, why do you need to ask the question?
And if you don’t know the answer, you can never know whether the answer is actually based in reality at all or a pure fabrication.