Alignment is a standard procedure to fine-tune pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions and serve as helpful AI assistants. We have observed, however, that the conventional alignment process fails to enhance the factual accuracy of LLMs, and often leads to the generation of more false facts (i.e. hallucination). In this paper, we study how to make the LLM alignment process more factual, by first identifying factors that lead to hallucination in both alignment steps:\ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we find that training the LLM on new knowledge or unfamiliar texts can encourage hallucination. This makes SFT less factual as it trains on human labeled data that may be novel to the LLM. Furthermore, reward functions used in standard RL can also encourage hallucination, because it guides the LLM to provide more helpful responses on a diverse set of instructions, often preferring longer and more detailed responses. Based on these observations, we propose factuality-aware alignment, comprised of factuality-aware SFT and factuality-aware RL through direct preference optimization. Experiments show that our proposed factuality-aware alignment guides LLMs to output more factual responses while maintaining instruction-following capability.

Last month, Apple announced that it will be introducing new child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts. After backlash from various industry experts including whistleblower Edward Snowden, Apple has now decided to back down from this initiative. On Friday, Apple issued a statement saying that they have taken the feedback of customers, researchers and advocacy groups into consideration and have decided to step back for now. "We have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features," read the statement. According to Snowden, no matter how well-intentioned, Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this.

Governments around the world are using high-tech surveillance measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak. But are they worth it? Edward Snowden doesn't think so. The former CIA contractor, whose leaks exposed the scale of spying programs in the US, warns that once this tech is taken out the box, it will be hard to put it back. "When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky," Snowden said in an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

Getting its world premiere at documentary festival IDFA in Amsterdam, Tonje Hessen Schei's gripping AI doc "iHuman" drew an audience of more than 700 to a 10 a.m. Many had their curiosity piqued by the film's timely subject matter--the erosion of privacy in the age of new media, and the terrifying leaps being made in the field of machine intelligence--but it's fair to say that quite a few were drawn by the promise of a Skype Q&A with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who made headlines in 2013 by leaking confidential U.S. intelligence to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. Snowden doesn't feature in the film, but it couldn't exist without him: "iHuman" is an almost exhausting journey through all the issues that Snowden was trying to warn us about, starting with our civil liberties. Speaking after the film--which he "very much enjoyed"--Snowden admitted that the subject was still raw for him, and that the writing of his autobiography (this year's "Permanent Record"), had not been easy. "It was actually quite a struggle," he revealed.

Edward Snowden has finally laid it all out - documenting his memoires in a new 432-page book, Permanent Record, which will be published worldwide on Tuesday, September 17. Meeting with both The Guardian and Spiegel Online in Moscow as part of its promotion, the infamous whistleblower spent nearly five hours with the two media outlets - offering a taste of what's in the book, details on his background, and his thoughts on artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other intelligence gathering tools coming to a dystopia near you. While The Guardian interview is'okay,' scroll down for the far more interesting Spiegel interview, where Snowden goes way deeper into his cloak-and-dagger life, including thoughts on getting suicided. Snowden describes in detail for the first time his background, and what led him to leak details of the secret programmes being run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK's secret communication headquarters, GCHQ. He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as "a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars".

Book a suite in a luxury hotel in Moscow, send the room number encrypted to a pre-determined mobile number and then wait for a return message indicating a precise time: Meeting Edward Snwoden is pretty much exactly how children imagine the grand game of espionage is played. But then, on Monday, there he was, standing in our room on the first floor of the Hotel Metropol, as pale and boyish-looking as the was when the world first saw him in June 2013. For the last six years, he has been living in Russian exile. The U.S. has considered him to be an enemy of the state, right up there with Julian Assange, ever since he revealed, with the help of journalists, the full scope of the surveillance system operated by the National Security Agency (NSA). For quite some time, though, he remained silent about how he smuggled the secrets out of the country and what his personal motivations were. Now, though, he has written a book about it. It will be published worldwide on September 17 under the title "Permanent Record." Ahead of publication, Snowden spent over two-and-a-half hours patiently responding to questions from DER SPIEGEL. DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Snowden, you always said: "I am not the story."

Fri 13 Sep 2019 17.00 BST Last modified on Fri 13 Sep 2019 17.00 BST The world's most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, says he has detected a softening in public hostility towards him in the US over his disclosure of top-secret documents that revealed the extent of the global surveillance programmes run by American and British spy agencies. In an exclusive two-hour interview in Moscow to mark the publication of his memoirs, Permanent Record, Snowden said dire warnings that his disclosures would cause harm had not come to pass, and even former critics now conceded "we live in a better, freer and safer world" because of his revelations. In the book, Snowden describes in detail for the first time his background, and what led him to leak details of the secret programmes being run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK's secret communication headquarters, GCHQ. He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as "a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars". Snowden also said: "The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition. "An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be not a mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer." He is concerned the US and other governments, aided by the big internet companies, are moving towards creating a permanent record of everyone on earth, recording the whole of their daily lives. While Snowden feels justified in what he did six years ago, he told the Guardian he was reconciled to being in Russia for years to come and was planning for his future on that basis. He reveals he secretly married his partner, Lindsay Mills, two years ago in a Russian courthouse. While he would rather be in the US or somewhere like Germany, he is relaxed in Russia, now able to lead a more or less normal daily life. He is less fearful than when he first arrived in 2013, when he felt lonely, isolated and paranoid that he could be targeted in the streets by US agents seeking retribution. "I was very much a person the most powerful government in the world wanted to go away.

I ask Trevor Paglen at his central Berlin studio. The prewar apartment was once surely the most surveilled place in the city, having formerly belonged to his friend Laura Poitras, the director who helped Edward Snowden go public. ''We're always being watched,'' he replies. The space is filled with computers: Against one wall, an assistant writes code while another researches data used to train artificial intelligence. Opposite is a long credenza filled with art monographs and topped by a slightly sinister collection of objets: a Dungeons & Dragons-style dragon trophy with a shield and saber; a toy model of the stealth submarine U.S.S.

In his 2014 book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald wrote that a contributing factor to Edward Snowden's decision to leak classified information from the NSA was his consumption of video games: "The moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his pre-adolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual." Whether or not you agree with Snowden's actions, the idea that playing video games could affect a person's ethical position or even encourage any kind of philosophical thought is probably surprising. Yet we're used to the notion that a person's thinking could be influenced by the characters and conundrums in books, film and television; why not games? In fact, games have one big advantage that makes them especially useful for exploring philosophical ideas: they're interactive. As any student of philosophy will tell you, one of the primary ways of engaging with abstract questions is through thought experiments.

It's almost four years since Edward Snowden leaked U.S. National Security Agency documents revealing the extent of the organization's surveillance of global internet traffic, but he's still making the headlines in Germany. At the Cebit trade show in Hannover, Germany, he'll be looking back at that period in live video interview from Moscow on Tuesday evening. There have been a lot of changes on the internet in those four years, but one of the biggest is the growth in the use of encryption. In 2013, the NSA had free rein and could listen in on almost any communication it wanted. And you don't have to be an enemy of the state to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging system such as WhatsApp simply to chat with friends.