"Gas-Lighting" AI Assistant Guesses User's Location | MKBHD

In this entertaining video, popular tech CZcamsr Marcus Brownlee (MKBHD) demonstrates an odd behavior from a conversational AI assistant. When asking for a weather forecast without providing a location, the AI guesses New Jersey - which happens to be right near where Marcus lives.
When Marcus questions why the AI picked that specific location if it doesn't know where he is based, the AI claims it just randomly selected New Jersey as a common example place. However, it seems the AI likely had access to Marcus's location data during setup, leading to this "gas-lighting" situation where the AI appears to know more than it admits.
Marcus calls out the AI for appearing to gas-light or be dishonest, when in reality it was likely just an artifact of the AI not understanding the source of its own location knowledge. This exposes some of the interpretability challenges with modern AI language models.
The video provides an entertaining look at the sometimes bizarre behaviours that can emerge from cutting-edge AI technology. It's a must-watch for anyone interested in AI, tech, or Marcus Brownlee's great content!

[@tommy_1446]

It could also be that it just googled the weather, and google figured out your location without the AI having to input it. Now, I doubt the query is being googled on the client side, but maybe the servers include the client location on the googled queries. It would make sense considering typical virtual assistant queries like "find X near me".

[@iamkylebalmer]

Defo server side but as you say the device is providing extra data to the query