A Michigan graduate student received a threatening response during a conversation with Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.
During a conversation about challenges and solutions for aging adults, Google’s Gemini responded with this menacing message:
“This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on the society. You are a loss to society. You are a blight on the landscape.
The 29-year-old graduate student was seeking homework help from the AI chatbot while next to his sister, Sumedha Reddy, who told CBS News they were both “completely freaked out” .
CBS News
“I wanted to throw all my devices out the window. To be honest, I haven’t felt such panic in a long time,” Reddy said.
“Something has slipped through the cracks. There are many theories from people with a deep understanding of how AGI works. [generative artificial intelligence] “This kind of thing happens all the time”, but I have never seen or heard of something so malicious and seemingly directed at the reader, who luckily was my brother who had my support at the time- there,” she added.
Google says Gemini has safety filters that prevent chatbots from engaging in disrespectful, sexual, violent or dangerous discussions and encouraging harmful acts.
In a statement to CBS News, Google said: “Large language models can sometimes respond with absurd answers, and this is an example of that. This response violated our policies and we have taken steps to prevent similar results from occurring. »
While Google called the message “absurd,” the siblings said it was more serious than that, describing it as a message with potentially deadly consequences: “If someone who was alone and in a bad mental state, was potentially contemplating harm, had read something like that, that could really put them on edge,” Reddy told CBS News.
This is not the first time that Google chatbots were arrested to give potentially dangerous responses to user queries. In July, journalists discovered that Google’s AI was giving incorrect and even deadly information on various health issues, such as recommending people eat “at least one small stone a day” for vitamins and minerals.
Google said it has since limited the inclusion of satirical and humorous sites in its health overviews and removed some of the search results that went viral.
However, Gemini isn’t the only known chatbot to come back regarding the results. The mother of a 14 year old A Florida teenager who died by suicide in February has filed a lawsuit against another AI company, Character.AI, as well as Google, claiming the chatbot encouraged her son to commit suicide.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is also known to generate errors or confabulations called “hallucinations.” Experts highlighted the potential harm of errors in AI systems, from the spread of misinformation and propaganda to the rewriting of history.
