Short read: Why does AI hallucinate?

You know Artificial Intelligence has truly arrived when you hear instances of chatbots making up information which appear right most of the time, akin to the delusions that intelligent humans go through. The article begins with a few such instances:

“Meta’s short-lived scientific chatbot Galactica made up academic papers and generated wiki articles about the history of bears in space. In February, Air Canada was ordered to honor a refund policy invented by its customer service chatbot. Last year, a lawyer was fined for submitting court documents filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations made up by ChatGPT.”

This making up of information is referred to as ‘Hallucination’. Why does this happen?

Turns out the large language models or LLMs behind this AI driven chatbots are designed to make up stuff:

“…When you ask a chatbot a question, it draws its response from the large language model that underpins it. But it’s not like looking up information in a database or using a search engine on the web.

Peel open a large language model and you won’t see ready-made information waiting to be retrieved. Instead, you’ll find billions and billions of numbers. It uses these numbers to calculate its responses from scratch, producing new sequences of words on the fly. A lot of the text that a large language model generates looks as if it could have been copy-pasted from a database or a real web page. But as in most works of fiction, the resemblances are coincidental. A large language model is more like an infinite Magic 8 Ball than an encyclopedia.

Large language models generate text by predicting the next word in a sequence. If a model sees “the cat sat,” it may guess “on.” That new sequence is fed back into the model, which may now guess “the.” Go around again and it may guess “mat”—and so on. That one trick is enough to generate almost any kind of text you can think of, from Amazon listings to haiku to fan fiction to computer code to magazine articles and so much more. As Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, likes to put it: large language models learn to dream internet documents….

…It’s all hallucination, but we only call it that when we notice it’s wrong. The problem is, large language models are so good at what they do that what they make up looks right most of the time. And that makes trusting them hard.”

How do we fix this? Given the complexity and sheer size of these models it is virtually impossible to humanly interfere and weed out made-up content. The article goes on to suggest possible solutions. Until then, be aware that sometimes, you might be acting basis your bot’s hallucination.

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