Why do AI chatbots tell porkies? Because LLMs are designed by liars

My request cannot be satisfied

photo © 2020 Eric Krull | https://unsplash.com/fr/@ekrull

Ooh, the things I could do with a robotic glove. I could use it to tickle my ivories.

No doubt you too read the newspaper reports following up a recent New Scientist story about a Japanese researcher who developed a motorised exo-skeletal glove to improve his piano-playing technique.

Good for budding virtuosos; great for fans of ironic double entendres and euphemisms.

If you have a horror of this sort of thing, you may be relieved to learn that my favourite euphemism at the moment isn’t another riff on the crass norms of 1970s adult humour. Nothing of the sort, although I do enjoy slipping one in. No, this one is taken from a public statement from Space X – issued the very same day that I read about the pianist-shuffling robotic glove – after one of its test rockets exploded.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” it said. “Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause."

In the Dabbsy household, an accidentally dropped mug on the kitchen floor no longer leads to the mug breaking into pieces. Instead, I issue a press release to Mme D to outline how the liquid containment vessel in question had been observed to experience a rapid unscheduled disassembly during the final stages of its descent.

Speaking of press releases, I have decided to become an actor. According to the “research” (i.e. “random survey of not many people”) in front of me, actors have better sex lives than any other profession. Giving an oddly specific example, they shag 550 per cent more often than bankers, it says here.

Ah, wait a moment. The survey didn’t quote “actors” exactly; it said “those in acting and performing”. Wow, even Widow Twankee is at it all night and between matinees. On the other hand, given that some of those “performers” could be sex workers servicing clients, it could be that the statistics are skewed. In reality, my bank manager could still be enjoying more action than Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Hemsworth or even Brad Pitt – once he’s out of hospital, that is.

Hey, I could be one of those bad actors on the dark web. Bad acting is all the rage. When a good actor forgets a line, they will probably use a code word, gesture or facial expression and wait for the prompt. A bad actor will panic and try to ad-lib in the hope nobody else notices. A very bad actor will feel emboldened by the improvisation, continue to spout a stream of bollocks and eventually ruin the whole play.

Chatbot AIs are very bad actors. Even if the prompter shouts out the correct line, AI will double-down on its own ad-libbed bollocks instead.