Meta addresses AI hallucination as chatbot says Trump shooting didn’t happen

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Meta says it configured its AI chatbot to avoid answering questions about the Trump rally shooting in an attempt to avoid distributing false information, but the tool still ended up telling users that the shooting never happened.

“Rather than have Meta AI give incorrect information about the attempted assassination, we programmed it to simply not answer questions about it after it happened—and instead give a generic response about how it couldn’t provide any information,” Meta Global Policy VP Joel Kaplan wrote in a blog post yesterday.

Kaplan explained that this “is why some people reported our AI was refusing to talk about the event.” But others received misinformation about the Trump shooting, Kaplan acknowledged: