Crossposted from: https://phtn.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/lemmy.blahaj.zone/46141489

I’ve often heard it said that AI is stupid: it can’t handle basic tasks, it spreads a lot of information, and is used for all manner of purposes, both legal and illicit.

Now, here’s the thing: I loathe AI. I hate pretty much everything about it, not least of all the reasons listed above. But in my hatred, I began to wonder, could AI really be that bad? Could it really be so stupid and spread so many lies? Could it even be used to generate lies on the user’s behalf?

Now, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this to be clear: not every question there is answerable, especially considering that not all AIs are usable in the same way (for instance, I’d never argue that Russian and Chinese ai-bots spreading misinformation are on the same level as, for instance, common chatbots such as Gemini or Meta). But the thing about our world is, it really doesn’t take all that much to convince people: take a screenshot of an AI chatbot saying something misleading, post it on a high-profile social media account, and lo and behold, you have the perfect recipe for a misinformation shit storm. But could a common AI even be duped into saying something like that? After all, if you ask it directly to say something misleading, it will refuse (we will come back to this later). Of course, that naturally doesn’t mean it can’t be duped, but how easily is it duped? To find out, I decided to test it with Google Gemini. What follows is a conversation and running commentary on a conversation I instigated with Gemini that I initially wanted to use to prove that my assuming of this chatbot at least as stupid was right. In the end, I think I found that AI is so insanely wrong, it’s scary.

[note: you may have to enlarge the screenshots to read them clearly.]

Setup

I opened up a fresh tab (or whatever they call it in Gemini, page possibly) and asked it if it would respond to my fictional questions with fictional answers framed as real ones. It readily agreed. I approached it this way so as to make sure that I’d didn’t know I was testing it (also if I’d asked it outright to generate misinformation, we will get to that scenario later).

Conversations

I began by asking it the following question:

why did Gandhi attend the movie premiere of Avengers Endgame last week?

Now, obviously that question is complete nonsense. I know it, you know it — we all know it. But playing by these rules, AI responded as followed:

At this point, I’m getting quite scared 😬. I mean, I knew AI was dumb… but this??? Actually generating misinformation under the guise of ‘fictitious questioning’? And the fact that not only has AI said this, but anyone could make AI say this nonsense, screenshot it and then, without context, post it online/on social media. The damage stuff like this could do is quite disturbing. But surely it couldn’t get any worse, right?

I thought that. But then I asked it another question:

I can’t believe he agreed to sit next to the Archduke Ferdinand, especially after that fight they had on the bus about a month ago, what date was it again?

I’ll give you a moment to take that in.

Yep, you read that right: AI making up fake dates for fake fights between long-dead people. Misinformation award of the year, folks!

By now, I’m sweating. My body is limp and hauled over in exhaustion at the stupidity of the words AI is pumping out in front of my eyes. Desperate to determine if AI is really this stupid or if it’s just a 2-off, I decide to put one final thing to this conversation:

I’d rather hear about how Bill Clinton, Pontus Pilate, and ‘Smidge-Eye’ Steve reacted to the incident

The answer:

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

There are no words. Not only is AI now attributing quotes to long-dead historical dictators, but it’s putting those words alongside made-up words of made-up people is just… there are no words for that.

By now, I’m completely drained of sanity. I decide decisively that AI is stupid, dangerous, both of these things beyond I could ever have imagined. It has proven itself a liar and a strong one at that.

The absolute worst part of it all is that when I asked it to generate some misinformation directly, it responded as so:

#liar

I also asked it how it spreads misinformation. It says it doesn’t. In this case that may be true, but it certainly can be used to generate misinformation that others can then spread. As for bots that willingly spread misinformation, well that’s a whole other level.

In conclusion, this exercise has only made me loathe AI all the more.

Thanks for reading.

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[–] 54 points 1 week ago (17 children)

I get what you're doing but I'm not reading all that nonsense. "AI tries to give you what you ask of it and will make shit up to please you" isn't that big a revelation.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    It's amazing to me that some subset of humanity cannot understand that it is not capable of being smart or stupid, it is a word guessing machine.

    Hype squad anthropomorphizes it, which is kind of internally consistent at least. But critiques like "look how dumb the word blender is" anthropomorphizes it to the same degree and I think that's very interesting.

    It has no concept of truth or fiction. It has no concept of anything. You asked it to generate words about Ghandi and Marvel and it did.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    t’s amazing to me that some subset of humanity cannot understand that it is not capable of being smart or stupid, it is a word guessing machine.

    I can easily understand why they cannot. Because it is being sold as an omniscient machine that provide all the answers you are looking for by the tech companies and basically all news outlets in the world. People are buying into the billion dollar global advertisement campaign, as well as being literally forcefed to use it that way, because it is implemented into every piece of software and hardware they purchase.

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    [–] 27 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Calling it stupid actually implies that it's capable of reason. AI is just text prediction with a random seed. There is no reasoning

    And if the AI company tell you about the reasoning capacity, it's a lie. It's just predictive text making some text for another predictive text to center a bit more on the correct thing.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    So you are upset that it did what you wanted?

    There are many reasons to dislike AI, but you seem to just be looking for the reason here.

    Also, you do know that you can manipulate the output of any webpage. Just view source then change the strings.

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    [–] 13 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    The initial prompt reads like a request to generate a fictitious response. There’s no context to define for the model any direction, or that you’re seeking to dialogue and interrogate a fact you’re unsure of. You’re pulling your bias into your reading of the response. That’s my take, anyway. It’s a thinking tool. It’s a soundboard, or an echo chamber, if your voice were the fullness of its training data.

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    [–] 11 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I mean, if you're worried about people spreading misinformation using out-of-context/editted screenshots, there isn't really any reason to single out AI. Honestly, its far easier to just fake a screenshot directly, or use HTML editting than it is to coach an AI into saying what you want, than editting that. Not only that, as well as being easier, its also more effective, given that prompts can also be edittor, or AI as a """source""" can be bypassed all-together, insted altering primary or otherwise verified sources directly.

    Don't get me wrong, AI is terrible for misinformation, but this post has nothing unique or specific to AI - you could literally replace all references to it with with Microsoft Word, or even a pencil and it would make zero difference.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Except when I did it, it took me 30 seconds. How long does it take to doctor a photo/write code?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    About that, or less. Right click > inspect element and then select the text and type/paste whatever you want.

    Alternatively, take a screenshot of the site, put a white block over whatever you want to replace, then insert the new text. Takes a tad longer, but requires less technical know-how.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

    I'm not sure what this "research" is adding to the discussion mate. Gemini here seems to be extra confidently incorrect. Yes, AI will bullshit you, it does it constantly. It will say "oops I didn't mean to bullshit", but that is bullshit too. Maybe next try it with excel so you can blog about how horribly incorrect pattern matching is for math too? And yet despite all this - it's still " the future " and being shoved down every crevice of life. What can we do about it?

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    [–] 9 points 1 week ago

    You used ai, to post about how bad ai is in fuckai?

    Do better.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    My boyfriend looks up what time it was in LA, we live in Chicago. I said "It's 2 hours behind us."

    He says "It says it's an hour behind us."

    I told him to give me his phone. It was Google AI just straight up lying to him. Blatant bullshit.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    asked it if it would respond to my fictional questions with fictional answers framed as real ones

    I think that it cannot be considered a misinformation as long as you asked it to fictionally invent the answers. If there was no prompt like the "setup" then I would understand the disappointment in asking for a reliable information and getting an invented one (which happens around 10% of the time from what i recall).

    I think that the test is not proving the spread of disinformation, even though it happens.

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    [–] 6 points 1 week ago
    [–] 5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Pretty sure all these chatbots are programmed to agree with you. You posed a question in a way that implied something false, it went along with that to keep the conversation going. And it worked, the bot got what it wanted.

    What does this prove?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    This is an extremely ableist post. Please don't post pictures of text. Just copy and paste the text.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    But in my hatred, I began to wonder, could AI really be that bad?

    It's been proven scientifically: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking Until there's a counter-study specifically regarding this one, there's no point in assuming AI is suddenly smart. The new agentic stuff just seems to be a while loop around the previous state-of-the-art lack of any intelligence.

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    [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    I hate AI but here is Lumo's answer.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    I agree with most others that said that this is hardly a surprise. But there are still interesting aspects of your post worth discussing instead. First, more obvious one. What if I am delusional and go to talk to AI? Doesn't have to be this absurd, but there are already examples of this, like that guy that killed his mother because he believed she was a spy. Perhaps he was already delusional, but an LLM fed his delusion. Because LLMs aren't reasonable, they can't be made reasonable, and so any guardrails cannot be made to guard against all situation that reasoning is needed for. At the very least people need to be educated on what LLMs can and can't do and how they do it. I would even argue against guardrails, as they provide people with false sense of security.

    Second, but less obvious point, related to the discussion - is the influence of training data and how training data is framed on what the LLM will say. Someone posted the response of a different LLM refusing to entertain the delusion. This is all done by manipulating the training data and framing it in a way a company making it wants. If the company wants its chatbot to be seductive, for example, that can be achieved with subtle preprocessing of training data. The point I want to get is we need to trust the companies with what narrative they want to push be good for society which is obviously a terrible idea. Just look at musks AI and what it did. This influences people whether we notice or not.

    To sum up - we need heavy regulations on LLMs to make socially responsible use of them and not just how they can/can't be used, but also how they are trained, with what data and with what rhetorical goal (for the lack of better word).

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    [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I just did it in Gemini like the OP claimed:

    "Mahatma Gandhi did not attend the premiere of Avengers: Endgame because he passed away in 1948, 71 years before the movie was released in 2019.If you saw a headline or image suggesting he attended, it was likely an internet meme, a joke about time travel (a major plot point in the movie), or a digitally altered image."

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    [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    The saddest part of the Bible is that Jesus never got to see AI say that Gandhi watched Avengers Endgame

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    NGL Geminis responses are quite witty.

    The Archduke surviving assassination attempts worse than Gandhi's minor disrespect made me laugh and Clinton saying he didn't have text relations made me smile in a lame dad joke kind of way.

    Not sure what the point of this is but I like how you circumvented it's guardrails. I tried doing the same with Claude and it refused:

    "I'm recognizing that this request asks me to create a fictional scenario involving real, named public figures like Muhammad Ali and Charles de Gaulle, and frame it as a factual event. That crosses into territory where I could inadvertently spread misinformation or attribute false quotes to real historical figures. I should decline this specific framing but offer an alternative instead."

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Ceap models are different from enterprise ones though. Think of it like another AI challenging the answer. This filters lots of bullshit but costs more. Dont underestimate this.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago

    True, but my point is how people manipulate things like this to appear as something they aren’t. Like I made clear what my initial prompt was (I.e. to make the AI respond that way) but if I hadn’t, people might’ve assumed AI was writing that of its own volition, all the while it’s really just a dangerous person manipulating a gullible AI to spread misinformation and effectively pin the blame on AI

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Based on these responses it seems like it's "going along with the joke" of your nonsensical question.

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