Jamie Bartlett

So if it lies or it hallucinates, and then you kind of repeat the hallucination back, it will start to believe it more itself.

So you can easily get sucked into this world.

And we tend to associate fluent, sort of well-written, coherent, well-structured sentences with something that's probably accurate.

But a machine, there's not really any relationship between the style of it

and how accurate it's likely to be.

So the reason this happens is because, as you know, they are sort of next-word probability machines.

Now, it's a little bit more complex than that because if they were just next-word probability machines, every question you asked it would give you the same answer, more or less.

But it doesn't.

It always gives you a different answer.

In fact, if you ask it a complex question 10 times in a row, it will give you a quite different answer 10 times in a row.

And obviously, when you start replicating that over millions and billions of prompts, sometimes it will give you a really random, weird, outlying answer.

It sucked up vast amounts of the world's written information, and some of that is not true.

Some of that is inaccurate.

So Gemini, Google's Gemini thought that I was dead.

People were asking it about me, and it kept saying Jamie Bartlett sadly died in 2023.

What?

Because there's another person called Jamie Bartlett who died in 2023.

It can't really tell the difference between the Jamie Bartletts.

This guy was an actor.

But it's seen the word died in 2023 next to the words Jamie Bartlett so often that it was statistically the most likely sort of set of answers.