Experts have found weaknesses, some serious, in hundreds of tests used to check the safety and effectiveness of new artificial intelligence models being released into the world.<\/p>\n
Computer scientists from the British government\u2019s AI Security Institute<\/a>, and experts at universities including Stanford, Berkeley and Oxford, examined more than 440 benchmarks that provide an important safety net.<\/p>\n They found flaws that \u201cundermine the validity of the resulting claims\u201d, that \u201calmost all \u2026 have weaknesses in at least one area\u201d, and resulting scores might be \u201cirrelevant or even misleading\u201d.<\/p>\n Many of the benchmarks are used to evaluate the latest AI models released by the big technology companies, said the study\u2019s lead author, Andrew Bean, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.<\/p>\n In the absence of nationwide AI regulation in the UK and US, benchmarks are used to check if new AIs are safe, align to human interests and achieve their claimed capabilities in reasoning, maths and coding.<\/p>\n The investigation into the tests comes amid rising concern over the safety and effectiveness of AIs, which are being released at a high pace by competing technology companies. Some have recently been forced to withdraw or tighten restrictions on AIs after they contributed to harms ranging from character defamation to suicide.<\/p>\n \u201cBenchmarks underpin nearly all claims about advances in AI,\u201d Bean said. \u201cBut without shared definitions and sound measurement, it becomes hard to know whether models are genuinely improving or just appearing to.\u201d<\/p>\n Google this weekend withdrew one of its latest AIs, Gemma<\/a>, after it made up unfounded allegations about a US senator having a non-consensual sexual relationship with a state trooper including fake links to news stories.<\/p>\n \u201cThere has never been such an accusation, there is no such individual, and there are no such new stories,\u201d Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, told Sundar Pichai, Google\u2019s chief executive, in a letter.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a harmless hallucination. It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model. A publicly accessible tool that invents false criminal allegations about a sitting US senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Google said its Gemma models were built for AI developers and researchers, not for factual assistance or for consumers. It withdrew them from its AI Studio platform after what it described as \u201creports of non-developers trying to use them\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cHallucinations \u2013 where models simply make things up about all types of things \u2013 and sycophancy \u2013 where models tell users what they want to hear \u2013 are challenges across the AI industry, particularly smaller open models like Gemma,\u201d it said. \u201cWe remain committed to minimising hallucinations and continually improving all our models.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Last week, Character.ai, the popular chatbot startup, banned teenagers<\/a> from engaging in open-ended conversations with its AI chatbots. It followed a series of controversies, including a 14-year-old killing himself<\/a> in Florida after becoming obsessed with an AI-powered chatbot that his mother claimed had manipulated him into taking his own life, and a US lawsuit from the family of a teenager <\/a>who claimed a chatbot manipulated him to self-harm and encouraged him to murder his parents.<\/p>\n The research examined widely available benchmarks but leading AI companies also have their own internal benchmarks that were not examined.<\/p>\n It concluded there was a \u201cpressing need for shared standards and best practices\u201d.<\/p>\n Bean said a \u201cshocking\u201d finding was that only a small minority (16%) of the benchmarks used uncertainty estimates or statistical tests to show how likely a benchmark was to be accurate. In other cases where benchmarks set out to evaluate an AI\u2019s characteristics \u2013 for example its \u201charmlessness\u201d \u2013 the definition of the concept being examined was contested or ill-defined, rendering the benchmark less useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Experts have found weaknesses, some serious, in hundreds of tests used to check the safety and effectiveness of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-269960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}