Copilot turns a court reporter into a child molester | Hacker News Reader

Copilot turns a court reporter into a child molester

heise.de

72 pointsnolist_policy26 comments

Paediatricians are somewhat frequently^ the victim of idiot attackers who think they are (based on the prefix of that job) paedophiles.

LLMs giving confidently incorrect information like this is so much worse, takes much less of an idiot to take it at face value, and if so minded to attack the innocent journalist (or anyone similarly associated with the real criminals, as the article points out).

(^I mean, relative to the incidence of paedophilia in the field, or certainly to attacks on other professions based on misguided assumptions; far too frequently, several occurrences in the last 24 years it seems (I was initially just wanting to check details on the one case I dimly recalled), but not like it's happening every week.)

I’ve never heard of a pediatrician being read as a pedophile. Is this somehow specific to the UK spelling or UK culture?

There are cases where I’ve noticed British English speakers use truncated forms where Americans don’t. Like “uni” for university, or “veg” - is it the case that paediatricians/pediatricians are referred to as paedos/pedos and that causes ambiguity? That would be unfortunate.

> is it the case that paediatricians/pediatricians are referred to as paedos/pedos

No. It's just stupidity.

No it's just barely literate idiot thugs. They're not pronounced or spelt any more similarly than in AmE or anything. It's just 'oh paediatrician that's what paedo is short for innit'.

Some examples:

https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/a-tale-told-too-much-the-pae...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4719364.stm

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/vigilante...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1353904/Paediatricia...

(there might be some overlap there, I haven't actually read more than necessary to check they're not cases of the paediatrician actually being a paedophile too, there is some of that unfortunately)

Once upon a time I bought a cheap pedometer. After a while I grew curious about how it actually worked. Some internet searching failed to turn up anything. A couple days later, while at work, it suddenly occurred to me that there were probably pedometer nerds and enthusiasts and they probably have web forums that could tell me how it worked.

I'm usually a silent thinking but sometimes when I have a sudden idea I'll say it out loud. This was one of those occasions and I started to say "I need to find some pedophile forums!". Fortunately about halfway through I realized that pedophile is not the correct word for "pedometer enthusiast" and managed to not complete the sentence.

It turns out that the "pedo" in "pedophile" and the "pedo" in "pedometer" are completely unrelated.

In "pedometer" it is not the prefix "pedo" attached to meter. It is "ped" connected to "meter" with "o", similar to the way the "o" is used in "speedometer". The "ped" is a shortening of the Latin "pedis". It came to English via the French pédomètre.

The "pedo" in "pedophile" comes from Greek paidos which means "child".

I have no idea what the actual word for "pedometer enthusiast" is. For that matter I also am not sure what the correct word for a meter that measures children would be.

this would be why you see the trend of using the classical paediatrician with the a, to distinguish it from the ped as in foot.

only just a little better that a pdf file enthusiast.

Not a problem we have in British English, 'preserving' the a from æ in spelling it paed~ ;)

> LLMs giving confidently incorrect information like this is so much worse

And even in the face of its pervasiveness I see more and more people just accepting their output.

Recently there was a post about using an “LLM” to do sentiment analysis on 600k orange site posts. Without even a modicum of irony.

Both the post and the comments lack any instance of the word “hallucination”, but I’ve seen downvotes being used as a means of silencing a lot here so maybe any dissenting voices were killed off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241124

Search engines have long used the defence that they're not publishers, they merely guide you to publications by other people. Replacing search with LLM changes that. Who's the publisher when Bing publishes the output of an LLM? I would say that it's Microsoft. And therefore Microsoft are liable when their machine libels people.

I think this is going to be a billion dollar legal question, and that you’re right. Companies really want to cut jobs but if precedents like that Air Canada case hold that statements by chatbots are legally binding and they lose the platform defense for misinformation that’s going to really sharply limit adoption for anything public facing.

> Air Canada case hold that statements by chatbots are legally binding

I think that's the only outcome that makes any legal sense. Corporations may be able to buy favourable verdicts, and weak US consumer protection will help them, but EU jurisdictions are not going to let you run a machine that tells lies about people, products or services.

Agreed. I just hope that they aren’t too successful at evading responsibility here in the U.S. since moving is not easy.

if you have a calculator or a function, and you supply the input, who owns the output?

Exactly: once you choose to use it for your business, you have ownership of the results. The challenge here will be if companies try to convince judges or lawmakers that there’s something magical about LLMs which mean they shouldn’t be liable for their business decisions.

The AI doesn't take the decisions. The AI suggests the decisions, which are then taken and implemented by the business. It's that simple.

This is interesting: "people in the EU also have the right to access the information stored about them under the GDPR" I think I am going to have to ask OpenAI about all the weights that are related to me. You should do the same.

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