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AIs are more likely to mislead people if trained on human feedback 

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t

By Edd Gent

2 October 2024

Illustration of a chatbot icon on a digital blue wavy background

Striving to come up with answers that please humans may make chatbots more likely to pull the wool over our eyes

JuSun/Getty Images

Giving AI chatbots human feedback on their responses seems to make them better at giving convincing, but wrong, answers.

The raw output of large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots like ChatGPT, can contain biased, harmful or irrelevant information, and their style of interaction can seem unnatural to humans. To get around this, developers often get people to evaluate a model’s responses and then fine-tune it based on this feedback.

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