566
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
566 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59483 readers
1737 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because it doesn’t “know” those things in the same way people know things.
It’s closer to how you (as a person) know things than, say, how a database know things.
I still remember my childhood home phone number. You could ask me to forget it a million times I wouldn’t be able to. It’s useless information today. I just can’t stop remembering it.
No, you knowing your old phone number is closer to how a database knows things than how LLMs know things.
LLMs don't "know" information. They don't retain an individual fact, or know that something is true and something else is false (or that anything "is" at all). Everything they say is generated based on the likelihood of a word following another word based on the context that word is placed in.
You can't ask it to "forget" a piece of information because there's no "childhood phone number" in its memory. Instead there's an increased likelihood it will say your phone number as the result of someone prompting it to tell it a phone number. It doesn't "know" the information at all, it simply has become a part of the weights it uses to generate phrases.
Are we sure that this is substantially different from how our brain remembers things? We also remember by association
But our memories exist -- I can say definitively "I know my childhood phone number." It might be meaningless, but the information is stored in my head. I know it.
AI models don't know your childhood phone number, even if you tell them explicitly, even if they trained on it. Your childhood phone number becomes part of a model of word weights that makes it slightly more likely, when someone asks it for a phone number, that some digits of your childhood phone number might appear (or perhaps the entire thing!).
But the original information is lost.
You can't ask it to "forget" the phone number because it doesn't know it and never knew it. Even if it supplies literally your exact phone number, it isn't because it knew your phone number or because that information is correct. It's because that sequence of numbers is, based on its model, very likely to occur in that order.