LLMs & Generative AI Ethics

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT, Claude, and Llama act as "word calculators", they predict the next plausible word in a sentence. While powerful, this statistical nature introduces unique ethical challenges.

The Hallucination Problem

Because LLMs are probabilistic, they do not "know" facts. They can confidently state falsehoods as if they were true. This is called a "hallucination." In high-stakes fields like law or medicine, blindly trusting an LLM can lead to disastrous consequences.

Copyright and Training Data

Generative AI models are trained on massive scrapes of the internet. This includes copyrighted books, artwork, and code. Is it "fair use" for an AI to learn from a copyrighted image and then generate a similar one? This is currently one of the biggest legal debates in technology.

Jailbreaking and Safety

Developers use "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback" (RLHF) to teach models not to generate harmful content (like bomb-making instructions). However, users constantly find "jailbreaks", tricks to bypass these safety filters.