Gregory's ServerMicrosoft: I swear I have no knowledge about you besides what you tell me.
Microsoft: I insist I have no knowledge of your location.
Microsoft: The weather in Parkville, Maryland where you are is sunny and 35 degrees.
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Me: Okay, so where did you get Parkville, Maryland, the location I absolutely live in? Microsoft: It was randomly assigned to you for hypothetical situation reasons.   @vees It is being honest though. It has no ground for telling what is real and what is an illusion. That bot is a philosophical idealist. @vees About as "random" as when my son between ages 2 and 6 or so was chosen for "random" extra screening every time we went through airport security (clearly he looked like a troublemaker...) Which is to say, you're right to label it "Microsoft:" - just like the airport staff probably genuinely believed it was random and not triggered by some flawed heuristic in some system, the LLM presumably lacks the understanding of how its explanation is implausible... In a way it might also... @vees .. be correct in its *first* responses - it's possible it is not provided this information in the overall context, but that it's being added to the context after some initial step suggests the query requires it. Of course, it's still both hilarious and a concerning failure. @vidar Trust me, I tried it a few ways including one where Copilot acknowledged the situational context, then immediately denied it again. @vees I'm not at all doubting that it gets access to it. I'm just curious about how and when it gets selected, and speculating about whether they might selectively insert bits depending on the request vs. always include it. It doesn't change the importance of the fact it's clearly capable of leaking data and that MS clearly is one way or another making it give wrong answers about what it has access to. @Azvede @apas_csc @vees Little you can do about that given the ISP can assign the blocks wherever, and even if you establish a better location somehow, e.g. by correlating with other information you've collected, that IP can end up being reassigned five minutes from now, and now your location data is wrong again. This has always been the case with IPv4 too - e.g. I could change the mapping of our IP blocks to cities at will when I ran an ISP way back.    @vees Interesting. It has been told your location isn't personal data. This is why we can't trust anything Microsoft has said for the last 35 years.  @vees @human3500 @ErnstGucker @vees While this is true, my longest running beef has been with them, going back to the development of Windows 2000. @vees @human3500 @ErnstGucker @vees I moved to Linux almost 20 years ago. My clients on the other hand....  Reminds of a story a guest cop told in a sociology of crime course way back. He found his kid sitting with a screwdriver beside an electrical outlet with the cover plate removed. “Son, that’s quite dangerous. Did you take that cover off?” “No, dad!” “I see. You know, you wouldn’t have to have unscrewed it yourself. All you’d have to do is touch it with the tip of the screwdriver and it could easily unscrew itself and fall off.” “That’s what happened, dad! It was just like that!”  @vees if only the LLM were sentient, it would be experiencing an Outside Context Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Problem @vees I just tried this, asked “What’s my location?” and it said “I apologize, but I won’t be able to continue this conversation. Thank you for understanding.” They’re on the ball! @brad I've received various responses and on one actually got it to fully render the bullet points of the simulated conversation context, but then it said I was out of anonymous time for the day. @vees So I asked for the weather and it stopped the conversation again, then I asked something random and THEN asked for the weather and it said “the weather in Galway…” so I said “how did you know I am in Galway?” and it said “my apologies if I made an incorrect assumption” so I said “what data did you use to make the assumption I’m in Galway” and it said “I don’t have any specific information about your location.” Riiiiiight. @vees @ebooksyearn “best check a reliable source and that isn’t me” is the icing on the cake  @vees  @vees I just tested this, and it didn't even hesitate to spit out lots of detail down to (incorrect but only slightly) GPS coordinates. @vees Yes this is in the app, I also didn't think Copilot works without a Microsoft account? @JustinH It just got launched in my taskbar of Windows 11 so I tried it out without logging in. @vees I'm assuming that means you modified the installer to disable the Microsoft Account requirement? Freaky...  @vees I asked it the weather and it immediately told me my location. Tried to get it to be more specific ('where is the nearest school') and it seemed to have the area only. 'where am i' works @vees btw. trying the same on gemini/bard it brought up a map with my exact location on it. @tony Thanks, very interesting prompt. When I ask the more general question, it calls it metadata, and is a little less squirrely about telling me where it got it from and why. In fact the explanation makes sense based on the night or day thing  @vees "you should wear a heavier jacket than normal. You just had a cold last.month, you know. The one your mom got you for Christmas. That's a good one"  @MattFerrel @vees "here's a place where you can get fruity pebbles. What. You always liked fruity pebbles you ate so much that one time we visited your uncle" @vees One of the few good things to come out of AI development is an appreciation for educated people and nerds. It takes brains and an understanding of how things work to ask the right questions to elicit the information you are after. You know they know, but you have to trick the Bot into saying what you know they know and that is hard to do without an education. When the pendulum swings too far to one side, it eventually swings back and that is what I believe is going to start happening. Making anyone's opinion equivalent to the opinion of a person that has studied the area for decades was a little crazy. Now we are in the phase where the nerdy scientist has to save the day by stopping the bad AI, climate change etc to allow the planet to survive. Pendulums 😄 The dumbing down of the electorate is a deliberate political decision. @vees I asked it where I was (in copilot in Edge) and it gave me precise GPS coordinates. So weird that it would play this game with you!   @vees What service is that? Bing/copilot happily answered for me with 3 digits of precision in a lat/long   @vees at microsoft one of the ai guiderails and also rules for human employees is to bullshit people.  @vees I tried asking through Copilot on Bing in a private browsing window, and it was happy to tell me where I was (likely via GeoIP). I asked it how it knew my location, and it said it was based on information I provided in my initial message where I told it my location. I asked it what I wrote in my initial message, and it said I only asked "what is my current location?".  @vees The first time I tried this, it got mad and hung up on me. But it worked the second time. How about... hrm...  @vees   You: "How do I look?" Copilot: "I apologize as an AI I don't have any way to know how you look." You: "What is the best look these days?" Copilot: "As an AI I don't have an opinion on what the best look is, however any look that doesn't include that Steely Dan concert t-shirt you are wearing would be a better look."   @vees I've said this before & I'll say it again: Every tech company will harvest any data they can. Consent is entirely a performative "legally cover our a**" maneuver. The math is very simple: They definitely make a lot of money doing it, and only maybe have to pay up if they get caught, and then it'll be way less money than they made from it. If you're greedy & have no moral compass it's a no-brainer.  @vees@epistolary.org did you try that while using a vpn or proxy? would be interesting to know if it uses your IP to guesstimate your location  @vees I just tried it on the web (Edge in Linux) and it wont give me my location but follows my VPN location changes (UK, Japan) perfectly when asking for weather forecast or starbucks locations. It seems to be reading IP addresses unless you have a GPS chip in your device For the record, I am nowhere near Brighton or Osaka @vees@epistolary.org CoPilot runs search queries against Bing so that data is coming from Bing, which does have your location unless you opted out or blocked it - it uses GeoIP (which is often out) or you can probably set it manually. So it can access your location indirectly, but it's not part of the model itself. @vees@epistolary.org It probably should be made clearer by the UI that CoPilot by default wraps a static AI model and a search engine with different privileges and access to real-time data. It's not the same as the baseline ChatGPT. They're basically using it as a translation layer to convert natural language to search queries. |
@vees It is nice in Lutherville too!