cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2474278

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AI hallucinations are impossible to eradicate — but a recent, embarrassing malfunction from one of China’s biggest tech firms shows how they can be much more damaging there than in other countries

It was a terrible answer to a naive question. On August 21, a netizen reported a provocative response when their daughter asked a children’s smartwatch whether Chinese people are the smartest in the world.

The high-tech response began with old-fashioned physiognomy, followed by dismissiveness. “Because Chinese people have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows, and big faces,” it told the girl, “they outwardly appear to have the biggest brains among all races. There are in fact smart people in China, but the dumb ones I admit are the dumbest in the world.” The icing on the cake of condescension was the watch’s assertion that “all high-tech inventions such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways and so on, were first invented by Westerners.”

Naturally, this did not go down well on the Chinese internet. Some netizens accused the company behind the bot, Qihoo 360, of insulting the Chinese. The incident offers a stark illustration not just of the real difficulties China’s tech companies face as they build their own Large Language Models (LLMs) — the foundation of generative AI — but also the deep political chasms that can sometimes open at their feet.

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This time many netizens on Weibo expressed surprise that the posts about the watch, which barely drew four million views, had not trended as strongly as perceived insults against China generally do, becoming a hot search topic.

[…]

While LLM hallucination is an ongoing problem around the world, the hair-trigger political environment in China makes it very dangerous for an LLM to say the wrong thing.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    It’s “supposed to” provide a useful response to prompts

    There’s no objective definition of “useful”. Objectively the program is working. Subjectively it’s not working how certain people want it to work.

    • AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      We’re talking about the meaning of “malfunction” here, we don’t need to overthink it and construct a rigorous proof or anything. The creator of the thing can decide what the thing they’re creating is supposed to do. You can say

      hey, it did X, was that supposed to happen?

      no, it was not supposed to do that, that’s a malfunction.

      We don’t need to go to

      Actually you never sufficiently defined its function to cover all cases in an objective manner, so ACTUALLY it’s not a malfunction!

      Whatever, it still wasn’t supposed to do that