You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
Yes, but as a solution it’s far inferior to not presenting questionable output to the public at all.
(There are a few specific AI/LLM types whose output we might be able to “human-proof”—for instance, if we don’t allow image generators to make photorealistic images of any sort for any purpose, they become much more difficult to abuse—but I can’t see how you would do it for search engine adjuncts like this without having a human curate their training sets.)
Prompt injection has shown us that basically any attempt to limit the output like this is doomed to fail. Like anti-piracy ones, where if you ask directly for the info it says no, but if you ask for the info under the guise of avoiding it, it gives up everything.
Or for instance with the twitter bot, you could get it to regurgitate its own horrifically hateful prompt, then give it a replacement prompt and tell it to change its whole personality, then tell it to critique its previous prompt. There is currently no way to create a prompt that has supremacy over the user input. You can’t ask it to keep a secret because it doesn’t know what a secret is.
I think because we’re getting access to hallucinations, it’s a bit like telling a person “don’t think about an elephant”. Well, they just did, because you prompted them to with the instruction. LLMs similarly can’t actually control what they output.