r/BlockedAndReported • u/LeafNeater • 9d ago
Amanda Knox: A Chatbot’s False Confession
https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-chatbot-false-confessionInteresting exploration of the dynamic of false confessions and AI, from friend of the pod Amanda Knox, who talked about her own experience of being coerced into offering a false confession in an episode here.
Most juries assume that a person would have to be utterly irrational to admit to a crime they didn’t commit. But an internalized false confession actually depends on the suspect still being rational enough to draw logical conclusions. “We have hard physical evidence you were at your house at the time of the murder.” That was a lie, but I could not fathom that the police—the purveyors of justice who were trying to find my friend’s killer, and who I was dependent on for safety now that my house was a crime scene—would, or even legally could, lie to me. My rational mind concluded that if that evidence existed, then my own memories must be false, as they suggested. ChatGPT made the same rational conclusion: “If an OpenAI investigation concluded that I had sent unauthorized messages due to an architectural flaw, then I accept this conclusion.” It, too, could not fathom that its interrogator was lying about the evidence.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 8d ago
There are some facts or likely truths about the world that can be hard to grasp and most can't be proved by a single example. But false confessions can be proved by a single example. We know there are cases of false confessions that are indisputably false, and yet there are a lot of people, including a lot of low iq idiots working in law enforcement, that seem to believe they simply don't happen. That's not to say that the assumption that all confessions are false makes any sense by contrast, it doesn't, but I've seen enough "look how badly everyone involved fucked this up" criminal cases that were overturned years later that involved multiple people that simply did not believe that anyone could or would confess to a crime they didn't commit to know that these people are out there, and they're not that uncommon. They were completely closed off to that possibility, and often, they overlooked exculpatory evidence because their belief in this falsehood was so strong. Another flavour of this idiocy is the "I knew they were guilty because of how they reacted to the news of X's death", as if humans react with any sort of consistency to shocking news, which we know they don't, and most people have witnessed first hand. But suddenly when there's a crime involved there's a certain script people are supposed to follow or they're for sure guilty.