Of water, customers and super intelligence
Last night our oldest came home from work to unwind and recount stories about their shift and the people he encountered. A common theme is a person will walk in and wanting either the bathroom code or a cup of water. He would love to give both out freely and corporate says in both of these instances they must be customers and he is duty bound to ask.
In most instances the folks acquiesce, others speak of physical ailments in protest and yet others direct their ire at an employee who would like to keep their job. I have to admit that when he told me about the water, I remember hearing that it was in fact some law saying that establishments that serve food had to give out water without requiring payment. We decided to ask the LLM about what the requirement was for establishments like the one our oldest works for. It came back with the affirmation that yes businesses such as these were required to give cups of water out to anyone who asked regardless of customer status and it cited a California Health and Safety Code as well! Looked very official, HSC 114259.1. It was late and I was ready to call this a win for my memory and a side eye at the corporation that was clearly skirting the law. He thought it odd that a big entity would do this though, and asked if that made any sense to me.
It didn’t. So I opened the computer back up, and copied the California Health and Safety Code cited by the LLM.
California Code, Health and Safety Code - HSC § 114259.1
The premises of each food facility shall be kept free of vermin.
If you’ve ever seen a more clear case of hallucination I can’t think of it. Given that reddit had some hand in a lot of training, this particular hallucination may be traceable back to some troll.
We both laughed and I did more “research” by scouring the internet for any actual reference to a code that would require water to be given out. In fact, California has emergency regulations on the books enacted during drought users restricting restaurants, bars and cafeterias from serving water unless a customer requests it (California Water Code 1058.5). This also does not mean that these establishments are forbidden from giving out water as a matter of course, but an emergency regulation that is enacted during drought years. It promotes responsible water use in a state that is always on the brink.
How can the LLM have gotten it so wrong? In fact, the prompt was likely too vague and assumed research that by default it wasn’t going to bother to do, just blindly go along generating plausible-sounding responses based on patterns in its training data and confidently proclaiming numbers that made no sense. We of course admonished the poor AGI wannabe and asked it to think about it again and research the web to find any codes given the first one was so wrong. It apologized profusely (of course), and said that no, in fact, no state in the country has a code requiring an establishment to offer water to individuals who are not customers. It’s a matter of policy in most instances. This is likely different depending on country.
What can we learn about this? When using an LLM and asking it research related queries that you would have gone to a search engine before, ask specifically for it to look this up on the web and provide references. Before taking an LLM at it’s probability-induced word, click the links and ensure you trust what was written.
Stay safe out there friends.