Verbal nonsense reveals limitations of AI chatbots
The era of artificial-intelligence chatbots that seem to understand and use language the way we humans do has begun. Under the hood, these chatbots use large language models, a particular kind of neural network. But a new study shows that large language models remain vulnerable to mistaking nonsense for natural language. To a team of researchers at Columbia University, it’s a flaw that might point toward ways to improve chatbot performance and help reveal how humans process language.
In a paper published online today in Nature Machine Intelligence, the scientists describe how they challenged nine different language models with hundreds of pairs of sentences. For each pair, people who participated in the study picked which of the two sentences they thought was more natural, meaning that it was more likely to be read or heard in everyday life. The researchers then tested the models to see if they would rate each sentence pair the same way the humans had.
In head-to-head tests, more sophisticated AIs based on what researchers refer to as transformer neural networks tended to perform better than simpler recurrent neural network models and statistical models that just tally the frequency of word pairs found on the internet or in online databases. But all the models made mistakes, sometimes choosing sentences that sound like nonsense to a human ear.
“That some of the large language models perform as well as they do suggests that they capture something important that the simpler models are missing,” said Dr. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute and a coauthor on the paper. “That even the best models we studied still can be fooled by nonsense sentences shows that their computations are missing something about the way humans process language.”
Consider the following sentence pair that both human participants and the AI’s assessed in the study:
That is the narrative we have been sold.
This is the week you have been dying. More