Large language models (LLMs) have been championed as tools that could democratize access to information worldwide, offering knowledge in a user-friendly interface regardless of a person’s background or location. However, new research from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) suggests these artificial intelligence systems may actually perform worse for the very users who could most benefit from them. A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who […]

By now, ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models have accumulated so much human knowledge that they’re far from simple answer-generators; they can also express abstract concepts, such as certain tones, personalities, biases, and moods. However, it’s not obvious exactly how these models represent abstract concepts to begin with from the knowledge they contain. Now a team from MIT and the University of California San Diego has developed a way to test whether a large language model (LLM) contains hidden biases, personalities, moods, or other abstract concepts. Their method can zero in on connections within a model that encode for a […]

AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that Russian influence campaigns are currently spreading to discourage Ukrainians from enlisting.  It is into this mess that Microsoft has put forward a blueprint, shared with MIT Technology Review on Thursday, for how to prove what’s real online.  An AI safety research team at the company […]