6 ms·

Yes, I think people underestimate the amount of imagined LLM use cases that require accurate responses. To the point that hallucinations will cost money in fin

Yes, I think people underestimate the amount of imagined LLM use cases that require accurate responses. To the point that hallucinations will cost money in fines & lawsuits. This is a new frontier in short sighted customer service staffing (non-staffing in this case). The people who are on the frontline communicating with customers can convert unhappy customers to repeat customers, or into ex-customers. There's a few brands I won't buy from again after having to jump through too many hoops to get (bad) warranty service.

jowea 3y ago
The fines and lawsuits may be way cheaper than human staff.
- jorisboris 3y ago
  Especially once we have ai lawyers ;)
  - kingo55 3y ago
    Judge, I'll refer you to my legal chatbot. I rest my case.
    - mortenjorck 3y ago
      Your selection of generative counsel has been confirmed. Please do not navigate away from this page while the trial runs. You will receive a notification when the verdict has been reached. This may take up to a minute.
      - jowea 3y ago
        Thank you for the best 2 paragraph cyberpunk story.
  - photonthug 3y ago
    This initially sounded pretty good until I thought it through. Democratizing access to council and forcing troll lawyers to deal with trolling bots seems good but it will shape up like other spam arms races while legal systems gear up to deal with the ddos attacks. Good for spammers and most entrenched players, bad for the public at large. Already we can’t manage to prosecute ex presidents in a timely manner before the next election cycle. If delays seem absurd now what will it be like when anything and everything remotely legal takes 10+ years and already sky-high costs triple?
    - the8472 3y ago
      Don't worry, AlphaJudge will provide swift justice at scale.
TechSquidTV 3y ago
With RAG it's entirely possible to essentially eliminate 100% of hallucinations, given you are ok with responding with "I don't know" once in a while. These situations are likely coming from poorly implemented chatbot, or they decided that "I dont know" was not acceptable, and really that should be a queue to send you to a real human.
- jerpint 3y ago
  There are no guarantees with RAG either, and RAG only works when the answer to the question is already printed out somewhere explicitly in the text, otherwise it’s definitely prone to hallucinate
  - alexxys 3y ago
    Yeah, RAG can't provide such guarantees. Moreover, even if the correct answer is printed somewhere, LLM+RAG still may produce wrong answer. Example from MS Copilot with GPT-4: https://sl.bing.net/ct6wwRjzkPc https://sl.bing.net/ct6wwRjzkPc It claims that OnePlus 6 has 6.4-inch display, but all linked pages actually claim that it's 6.28. Display resolution and aspect ratio are also wrong in the response.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      It's funny it seems to have a lot of trouble extracting tabular data, which arguably is one of the things I hear people trying to do with it..
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  This claim seems wildly inaccurate, as even with GPT-4 in a single conversation thread with previous human-written answers included, a repeat of a similar question just resulted - in my testing today - in a completely hallucinated answer. I think your claim might be based on anecdotal testing. (I used to have that same feeling after my first implementation of RAG)... Once you get a few thousand users running RAG-based conversations, you quickly see that it's "good enough to be useful", but far from being as dreamy as promised.
citizenpaul 3y ago
>that hallucinations will cost money in fines & lawsuits. Sure. They are now out about $600. They probably already laid off 500+ customer service jobs costing conservatively 30k a year each. Not including mgmt,training,health,ect. I don't think it will make a difference to the ivory tower C levels. We will just all get used to a once again lower quality help/product. Another great "enshitification" wave of the future with "AI" It also assumes that the customer service people dont make mistakes at a similar level anyway. Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good?
- eru 3y ago
  > Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good? If it allows them to reduce costs (and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices), I'm fairly happy with a new normal. See also how air travel in general used to be a lot more glamorous, but also a lot more expensive.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices i found the bug.
    - eru 3y ago
      Cynicism aside, air travel is one of the industries with pretty healthy levels of competition. (At least in Europe and South East Asia. I haven't spent much time in North America, so can't judge the market there.) People love to hate eg RyanAir, but their effect on prices is felt throughout the industry; even if you never take a single RyanAir flight.
  - citizenpaul 3y ago
    Yeah they pass those cost saving right onto record corporate profits for the last 20 years...
    - 3y ago
wongarsu 3y ago
It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits. The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level. They won't beat great costumer support agents, but most companies don't have many of those
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  The bar isn't even that high. They only need to increase the lawsuit/settlement amount by less than the amount the companies saves by automation.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuit A human will be more likely to say "I don't know" or pass you along, rather than outright lie.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mmh0000 3y ago
    Maybe... Over two decades ago (holy crap, I'm old), I used to work in the call center for a major airline. I was the guy you got when you complained to the 1st level rep that you wanted their manager, then you got sent to the 2nd level rep and wanted their manager. And that was me. 90% of my job was undoing and compensating passengers for the incorrect information either the phone agent or gate agent gave them. The other 10% was dealing with workarounds to technical issues in our booking software.
  - KiranRao0 3y ago
    I find it common for human customer support people to give inaccurate information. I don't know about "outright lying", but I've had people tell me things that are factually incorrect.

jowea 3y ago

The fines and lawsuits may be way cheaper than human staff.

jorisboris 3y ago
Especially once we have ai lawyers ;)
- kingo55 3y ago
  Judge, I'll refer you to my legal chatbot. I rest my case.
  - mortenjorck 3y ago
    Your selection of generative counsel has been confirmed. Please do not navigate away from this page while the trial runs. You will receive a notification when the verdict has been reached. This may take up to a minute.
    - jowea 3y ago
      Thank you for the best 2 paragraph cyberpunk story.
- photonthug 3y ago
  This initially sounded pretty good until I thought it through. Democratizing access to council and forcing troll lawyers to deal with trolling bots seems good but it will shape up like other spam arms races while legal systems gear up to deal with the ddos attacks. Good for spammers and most entrenched players, bad for the public at large. Already we can’t manage to prosecute ex presidents in a timely manner before the next election cycle. If delays seem absurd now what will it be like when anything and everything remotely legal takes 10+ years and already sky-high costs triple?
  - the8472 3y ago
    Don't worry, AlphaJudge will provide swift justice at scale.

TechSquidTV 3y ago

With RAG it's entirely possible to essentially eliminate 100% of hallucinations, given you are ok with responding with "I don't know" once in a while. These situations are likely coming from poorly implemented chatbot, or they decided that "I dont know" was not acceptable, and really that should be a queue to send you to a real human.

jerpint 3y ago
There are no guarantees with RAG either, and RAG only works when the answer to the question is already printed out somewhere explicitly in the text, otherwise it’s definitely prone to hallucinate
- alexxys 3y ago
  Yeah, RAG can't provide such guarantees. Moreover, even if the correct answer is printed somewhere, LLM+RAG still may produce wrong answer. Example from MS Copilot with GPT-4: https://sl.bing.net/ct6wwRjzkPc https://sl.bing.net/ct6wwRjzkPc It claims that OnePlus 6 has 6.4-inch display, but all linked pages actually claim that it's 6.28. Display resolution and aspect ratio are also wrong in the response.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    It's funny it seems to have a lot of trouble extracting tabular data, which arguably is one of the things I hear people trying to do with it..
sebastiennight 3y ago
This claim seems wildly inaccurate, as even with GPT-4 in a single conversation thread with previous human-written answers included, a repeat of a similar question just resulted - in my testing today - in a completely hallucinated answer. I think your claim might be based on anecdotal testing. (I used to have that same feeling after my first implementation of RAG)... Once you get a few thousand users running RAG-based conversations, you quickly see that it's "good enough to be useful", but far from being as dreamy as promised.

citizenpaul 3y ago

>that hallucinations will cost money in fines & lawsuits. Sure. They are now out about $600. They probably already laid off 500+ customer service jobs costing conservatively 30k a year each. Not including mgmt,training,health,ect. I don't think it will make a difference to the ivory tower C levels. We will just all get used to a once again lower quality help/product. Another great "enshitification" wave of the future with "AI" It also assumes that the customer service people dont make mistakes at a similar level anyway. Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good?

eru 3y ago
> Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good? If it allows them to reduce costs (and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices), I'm fairly happy with a new normal. See also how air travel in general used to be a lot more glamorous, but also a lot more expensive.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices i found the bug.
  - eru 3y ago
    Cynicism aside, air travel is one of the industries with pretty healthy levels of competition. (At least in Europe and South East Asia. I haven't spent much time in North America, so can't judge the market there.) People love to hate eg RyanAir, but their effect on prices is felt throughout the industry; even if you never take a single RyanAir flight.
- citizenpaul 3y ago
  Yeah they pass those cost saving right onto record corporate profits for the last 20 years...
  - 3y ago

wongarsu 3y ago

It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits. The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level. They won't beat great costumer support agents, but most companies don't have many of those

AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
The bar isn't even that high. They only need to increase the lawsuit/settlement amount by less than the amount the companies saves by automation.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuit A human will be more likely to say "I don't know" or pass you along, rather than outright lie.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mmh0000 3y ago
  Maybe... Over two decades ago (holy crap, I'm old), I used to work in the call center for a major airline. I was the guy you got when you complained to the 1st level rep that you wanted their manager, then you got sent to the 2nd level rep and wanted their manager. And that was me. 90% of my job was undoing and compensating passengers for the incorrect information either the phone agent or gate agent gave them. The other 10% was dealing with workarounds to technical issues in our booking software.
- KiranRao0 3y ago
  I find it common for human customer support people to give inaccurate information. I don't know about "outright lying", but I've had people tell me things that are factually incorrect.