An off-grid AI sounds like a great survival assistant, but is better left to roleplaying the zombie apocalypse
Would you rather play Russian roulette with an LLM or put your health and safety in the hands of a professional
An off-grid AI may seem like an ideal survival assistant in a post-apocalyptic setting like a zombie outbreak, but this is purely a fun exercise with limited real-world applicability. The premise suggests downloading extensive data like the entire English Wikipedia onto a compact device, but despite their impressive size, these models do not guarantee accurate information retrieval.
They suffer from a phenomenon known as hallucination, wherein they confidently produce fabricated data, believing it to be factual. This is because large language models don't process information in a way that allows them to distinguish between which words belong together, but rather rely on statistical probabilities of word sequences.
In a real emergency, an LLM wouldn't have the luxury of retrieving relevant data from the web, and it likely wouldn't benefit from the same safety measures as larger, more established chatbots. The training of these models on vast amounts of data does not equate to their ability to understand context or provide appropriate responses.
For instance, medical professionals have warned against relying on LLMs for health advice, as these models often lack the ability to read between the lines or respond to nuanced queries. Even with a local LLM, there is a significant risk of making dangerous errors when it comes to matters like determining the edibility of berries.
While roleplaying a zombie apocalypse may seem harmless, allowing the model to act as a survival guide could potentially lead to dire consequences.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
