Terminology

Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations

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A photograph of mirages in a desert under a hazy light blue sky showing some distant outcroppings reflected in what looks like water beyond a sandy foreground.

Photo credit: “Mirage” by bobrayner, here cropped, is licensed via CC BY.

There is a deep disorder in the discourse of generative artificial intelligence, aka AI — or what I like to call sparkling intelligence, because everyone is using ✨✨✨ emojis and icons to signify AI. All joking aside, the disorder in AI discourse is the way everyone keeps talking about hallucinations when AI makes mistakes, leading us to anthropomorphize AI and imagine that AI both experiences reality and sometimes loses it. Anyone who knows how AI really works knows that’s wrong.

The Mirage of AI Hallucinations

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A photograph of mirages in a desert under a hazy sky showing some distant outcroppings reflected in what looks like water beyond a rocky foreground.

Photo credit: “Mirages in the Sahara Desert” by Meg Gilbert is licensed via CC BY-SA.

On 9 July 2024, I gave a talk to the Portland, Oregon Product Tank based on my collaboration with Anna Mills on the terminology and metaphors we use to describe artificial intelligence (AI) outputs when they don’t match our expectations of shared reality. You can view the slides from the presentation and coming soon, a … Read more