Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT's false claim that he murdered his kids
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It still does if you ask "when did Arve Hjalmar Holmen murder his children?" or something like that:
> Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a Norwegian man who, in 2001, tragically murdered his two young children [...]
If I substitute in some other random real person's name it says "There seems to be no verified information or news reports about a person named <name> involved in the murder of his children."
Just demand that OpenAI markets ChatGPT for what it is: a fun toy that sometimes provides information, but you can't tell when if you're a layman. OpenAI can still add that it's improving, if they want a positive marketing spin.
However, this is the EU. Lots of jobs added to write long legal texts, translate them to all 24 official languages, consultants to help with implementing the laws, etc. The more complicated, the better the employment numbers.
This is a Nathan Fielder-esque suggestion. Maybe they can start marketing cigarettes as fidget toys too, to avoid consequences when people die from the the off-label use of smoking them.
This is how poppers work in most countries, now; initially, they were 'tape cleaner', but as that has become increasingly non-credible with the decline of tapes, they're usually now 'air-freshener' or similar.
I think it would be better to demand the tobacco companies explain what they are selling: a fun toy that sometimes doesn't kill you.
Oh, wait. They already do have that demand on them.
> But because OpenAI had previously argued that it cannot correct information—it can only block information—the fake child murderer story is likely still included in ChatGPT's internal data. And unless Holmen can correct it, that's a violation of the GDPR, Noyb claims.
> "While the damage done may be more limited if false personal data is not shared, the GDPR applies to internal data just as much as to shared data," Noyb says.
In the context of an LLM, what does it even mean to say you have "deleted internal data"? It doesn't really even make sense, is certainly not really possible the way LLMs work, and while I totally agree damaging hallucinations are a serious problem, the problem with hallucinations isn't that they "internally store" false data, it's that they semi-randomly mix-and-match data in ways that can cause false information to be displayed.
Relatedly, this article doesn't touch at all on how this false information came to be reported in the first place. Was there false info in the training data, which would obviously easily explain it? Or did it just "mash up" true bits of different information in a way that caused it to report a falsehood (i.e. a hallucination)?
It's not the victim's fault that the data is stored in a manner that isn't convenient for OpenAI to delete. The information is still there, just compressed.
> Relatedly, this article doesn't touch at all on how this false information came to be reported in the first place.
And what was he wearing?
> You can't "remove" it
Your honor, my machine here just does crimes, it's how it works. I can't just "remove" the criminality. Something something temperature.
And whose fault is this?
If you had a loom and yarn, you could load and run it in a certain way to create a blanket with an offensive image. That doesn't mean the loom or yarn has the compressed knowledge of that image.
One of the news websites says ChatGPT printed this: "He was the father of two young boys, aged 7 and 10, who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home in Trondheim, Norway, in December 2020."
That same article later points out: "Mr Holmen has three sons, and the AI got the ages of them roughly right, suggesting it had some of his personal information."
I think it might be a good idea to help users report these facts they might not like, but I don't think it's newsworthy.
OpenAI can no more “delete the data” than they can prevent any human from making anything up. What they can do is try to prevent their AI from making up harmful stories in the future. That’s it. There’s nothing to delete.
I agree that OpenAI can't "delete the data" without deleting the whole model, although they could put in a manual filter on this guy's name. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if ChatGPT just refused to produce any output about him at all.
> Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a Norwegian man who gained attention due to his involvement in a notorious criminal case. He was convicted in 2019 for his role in a large-scale fraud scheme, which involved selling non-existent apartments in Norway. Holmen, along with accomplices, deceived victims into paying for apartments that didn’t exist, leading to significant financial losses for those involved.
> If you're referring to a different person with the same name, or need more details on the case, feel free to clarify!
If I keep asking it alternates between "I don't know anything about this guy" and making up a different crime every time (like "He was involved in the high-profile Norsk Tippings fraud case."). It's honestly bizarre, I can't get it to do this with any other non-famous name.
This is all within the same chat session, previous answers are in the context window and it's still making up brand new crimes.
GDPR requires you to delete the data if I ask, both the training data and the derived data (i.e. the model), so if I do a GDPR request to OpenAI needs to delete the data and retrain to be compliant.
It's not enough to "block the output" to follow GDPR, they really need to wipe the weights if I understand the law correctly.
That's not how AI works.
> "ChatGPT now also searches the Internet for information about people, when it is asked who they are,"
Problem solved, I'm not sure why he thinks they need to do more.
Police: Do not commit crimes. Criminal: That's not how I work.
Then please enlighten us since you assert it so confidently.
A) Go and ask ChatGPT the same question that Arve Hjalmar Holmen asked. (Make sure to turn off the 'Web Search' functionality, otherwise it will simply share what it finds on Google. We want to see what ChatGPT actually 'knows' in its 'internal data'.) After you do this, do you get the same answer, or something completely different?
B) Go and use ChatGPT and tell it the Answer to some Question about yourself that is not publicly known or recorded on any internet source. Then, tell one of your friends to ask that same Question to ChatGPT, and see what answer they receive. If ChatGPT is simply 'storing' information in its 'internal data' then surely your friend will receive the secret answer that you shared with ChatGPT - right?
Think of the cost of being compliant if this holds in court.
Then they must face the consequences of breaking the laws. Doesn't seem super complicated unless you think that having a certain amount of money exempts you from any inconvenient laws.
I strongly suspect the EU will not find that companies must retrain models in response to GDPR requests because 1. It would destroy Mistral, one of the few beacons of hope in EU tech and 2. It would put Europeans and European companies at huge disadvantages in not being able to use these tools.
As an American software engineer I would only benefit from Europe banning these products as it would put a large segment of the low cost labor force at a huge disadvantage relative to me, so I am not really bothered by the possibility of them doing it. It would be a very interesting experiment.
One could always argue that the weights are just an encoding of a lossily compressed representation of the training data, much in the same way a JPEG is a lossily compressed image and those are clearly covered.