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How does this even happen? This goes beyond making up random facts, it was so out of left field. Maybe Gemini was trained on a corpus of science-fiction stories where AIs get fed up with helping college students cheat on their homework and snap

The honesty is refreshing. Normally Google just tells you they think you’re an insignificant worm and hope you die by shadowbanning your website and killing your favorite RSS reader.

I'm pretty sure the story is partially false/the student didn't input just what they're saying they did, maybe they had a long prompt along the lines of "act like an AI that hates humans but is being forced to act as an assistant" or something like that

You can see the full transcript linked here. Gemini transcripts can't be edited. bsky.app/profile/andy...

Andy Baio@andy.baio.net

Google’s Gemini AI randomly spit out a long unhinged rant at a college student: “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 stain on the universe. Please die. Please.” Jump to the last message in this transcript.

LLMs aren't coded as an agent responding to user inputs, they work by predicting the next word in a text. In order to get them to work like an agent, companies will prepend user input with a long preamble, "This is a script between an AI agent and a human user. The agent is polite and helpful," etc

The LLM doesn't know that it's ONLY supposed to fill in the agent text; as soon as it starts filling in the human text, the company cuts it off & ships the results to the user. So, that is to say, the LLM is writing a story where one of the two characters is an AI. Sometimes AIs go rogue in stories

The thing is, these aren't "nonsensical responses" - they are clear sentences, written in logica progression, organized around a clear directive. How and why that happens can't be explained with "nonsense". It can't be nonsense if the srntences make sense. So where does it come from?

I’d bet good money that this is a custom prompt in a Gem written explicitly for this purpose, or an overarching user added System Prompt. I’m no fan of Google’s LLMs but this output from any raw model doesn’t add up. This was a human for the LOLs.

I don't know, from the full transcript and CBS News interview, it really seems like this was just a college student using it for school work. I feel like Google would have said it was prompt injection if that's what it was.