Here is a tidbit from a friend of mine who works in AI from a somewhat recent conversation when I asked him about why hallucination hasn’t been removed/corrected (my answer is refracted through my own understanding of his more technical answer, so take with a grain of salt).
It can’t. Not fully. Calling bad outcomes a “hallucination” is misleading, because it suggests such results are an aberration or an internal mistake (I would extend this and say any form of anthropomorphizing masks what actually occurs). They are not mistakes. They are an undesirable outcome, but one that is an unavoidable product of the “generative” algorithms. The capacity that allows such algorithms to “generate” also allows them to generate misleading or incorrect information; if you strangle that, “AI” is no longer “intelligence” (by their terms; I wouldn’t call it intelligence at all). AI can’t “judge” or “evaluate” or “think;” it can only execute algorithms based on larger and larger data sets. To put it another way: “hallucinations” are not a feature or a bug; they are part of the structure. Techs can add layers of correctives and more data helps (it also creates its own problem), but my friend said they’ll never eliminate them without wholesale rebuilding from the ground up and rethinking what they take to be “intelligence.” Of course, the other—rather terrifying—problem that he mentioned was that AI models have become so complex, “no one can really knows what is happening internally” so correctives are hit or miss and these problems are likely to only get worse. In this way, we’re the guinea pigs for both building them up with our data and surfacing the problems (with sometimes tragic outcomes, if you’ve followed recent news, particularly with ChatGPT adding “personality traits”).
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STEVEN E. LINDQUIST, PH.D.
ALTSHULER DISTINGUISHED TEACHING PROFESSORASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, RELIGIOUS STUDIES
DIRECTOR, ASIAN STUDIES
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Literary-Life-of-Yajnavalkya
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