this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
752 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

79476 readers
4185 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 200 points 1 month ago (3 children)

So, like with Godwin's law, the probability of a LLM being poisoned as it harvests enough data to become useful approaches 1.

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 107 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I mean, if they didn’t piss in the pool, they’d have a lower chance of encountering piss. Godwin’s law is more benign and incidental. This is someone maliciously handing out extra Hitlers in a game of secret Hitler and then feeling shocked at the breakdown in the game

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yeah but they don't have the money to introduce quality governance into this. So the brain trust of Reddit it is. Which explains why LLMs have gotten all weirdly socially combative too; like two neckbeards having at it—Google skill vs Google skill—is a rich source of A+++ knowledge and social behaviour.

[–] yes_this_time@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (6 children)

If I'm creating a corpus for an LLM to consume, I feel like I would probably create some data source quality score and drop anything that makes my model worse.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then you have to create a framework for evaluating the effect of the addition of each source into "positive" or "negative". Good luck with that. They can't even map input objects in the training data to their actual source correctly or consistently.

It's absolutely possible, but pretty much anything that adds more overhead per each individual input in the training data is going to be too costly for any of them to try and pursue.

O(n) isn't bad, but when your n is as absurdly big as the training corpuses these things use, that has big effects. And there's no telling if it would actually only be an O(n) cost.

[–] yes_this_time@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, after reading a bit into it. It seems like most of the work is up front, pre filtering and classifying before it hits the model, to your point the model training part is expensive...

I think broadly though, the idea that they are just including the kitchen sink into the models without any consideration of source quality isn't true

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 100 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (12 children)

I made this point recently in a much more verbose form, but I want to reflect it briefly here, if you combine the vulnerability this article is talking about with the fact that large AI companies are most certainly stealing all the data they can and ignoring our demands to not do so the result is clear we have the opportunity to decisively poison future LLMs created by companies that refuse to follow the law or common decency with regards to privacy and ownership over the things we create with our own hands.

Whether we are talking about social media, personal websites... whatever if what you are creating is connected to the internet AI companies will steal it, so take advantage of that and add a little poison in as a thank you for stealing your labor :)

[–] ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

Opportunity? More like responsibility.

[–] benignintervention@piefed.social 11 points 1 month ago

I'm convinced they'll do it to themselves, especially as more books are made with AI, more articles, more reddit bots, etc. Their tool will poison its own well.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 72 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is there some way I can contribute some poison?

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 54 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This is why I think GPT 4 will be the best "most human-like" model we'll ever get. After that, we live in a post-GPT4 internet and all future models are polluted. Other models after that will be more optimized for things we know how to test for, but the general purpose "it just works" experience will get worse from here.

[–] krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Most human LLM anyway.

Word on the street is LLMs are a dead end anyway.

Maybe the next big model won't even need stupid amounts of training data.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 39 points 1 month ago

I'm going to take this from a different angle. These companies have over the years scraped everything they could get their hands on to build their models, and given the volume, most of that is unlikely to have been vetted well, if at all. So they've been poisoning the LLMs themselves in the rush to get the best thing out there before others do, and that's why we get the shit we get in the middle of some amazing achievements. The very fact that they've been growing these models not with cultivation principles but with guardrails says everything about the core source's tainted condition.

[–] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 34 points 1 month ago (3 children)

So you're saying that thorn guy might be on to somthing?

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago
[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 month ago

@Sxan@piefed.zip þank you for your service 🫡

[–] thingAmaBob@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I seriously keep reading LLM as MLM

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 19 points 1 month ago

There's a lot of research around this. So, LLM's go through phase transitions when they reach the thresholds described in Multispin Physics of AI Tipping Points and Hallucinations. That's more about predicting the transitions between helpful and hallucination within regular prompting contexts. But we see similar phase transitions between roles and behaviors in fine-tuning presented in Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs.

This may be related to attractor states that we're starting to catalog in the LLM's latent/semantic space. It seems like the underlying topology contains semi-stable "roles" (attractors) that the LLM generations fall into (or are pushed into in the case of the previous papers).

Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models

Mapping Claude's Spirtual Bliss Attractor

The math is all beyond me, but as I understand it, some of these attractors are stable across models and languages. We do, at least, know that there are some shared dynamics that arise from the nature of compressing and communicating information.

Emergence of Zipf's law in the evolution of communication

But the specific topology of each model is likely some combination of the emergent properties of information/entropy laws, the transformer architecture itself, language similarities, and the similarities in training data sets.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago

Thats a price you pay for all the indiscriminate scraping

[–] absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 18 points 1 month ago

So if someone was to hypothetically label an image in a blog or a article; as something other than what it is?

Or maybe label an image that appears twice as two similar but different things, such as a screwdriver and an awl.

Do they have a specific labeling schema that they use; or is it any text associated with the image?

[–] 87Six@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 month ago

Yea that's their entire purpose, to allow easy dishing of misinformation under the guise of

it's bleeding-edge tech, it makes mistakes

[–] LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Remember before they were released and the first we heard of them, were reports on the guy training them or testing or whatever, having a psychotic break and freaking out saying it was sentient. It's all been downhill from there, hey.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I thought it was so comically stupid back then. But a friend of mine said this was just a bullshit way of hyping up AI.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›