When someone sees something that isn’t there, people often refer to the experience as a hallucination. Hallucinations occur when your sensory perception does not correspond to external stimuli.
Technologies that rely on artificial intelligence can have hallucinations, too.
When an algorithmic system generates information that seems plausible but is actually inaccurate or misleading, computer scientists call it an AI hallucination. Researchers have found these behaviors in different types of AI systems, from chatbots such as ChatGPT to image generators such as Dall-E to autonomous vehicles. We are information science researchers who have studied hallucinations in AI speech recognition systems.
Wherever AI systems are used in daily life, their hallucinations can pose risks. Some may be minor – when a chatbot gives the wrong answer to a simple question, the user may end up ill-informed. But in other cases, the stakes are much higher. From courtrooms where AI software is used to make sentencing decisions to health insurance companies that use algorithms to determine a patient’s eligibility for coverage, AI hallucinations can have life-altering consequences. They can even be life-threatening: Autonomous vehicles use AI to detect obstacles, other vehicles and pedestrians.
Making it up
Hallucinations and their effects depend on the type of AI system. With large language models – the underlying technology of AI chatbots – hallucinations are pieces of information that sound convincing but are incorrect, made up or irrelevant. An AI chatbot might create a reference to a scientific article that doesn’t exist or provide a historical fact that is simply wrong, yet make it sound believable.
In a 2023 court case, for example, a New York attorney submitted a legal brief that he had written with the help of ChatGPT. A discerning judge later noticed that the brief cited a case that ChatGPT had made up. This could lead to different outcomes in courtrooms if humans were not able to detect the hallucinated piece of information.
With AI tools that can recognize objects in images, hallucinations occur when the AI generates captions that are not faithful to the provided image. Imagine asking a system to list objects in an image that only includes a woman from the chest up talking on a phone and receiving a response that says a woman talking on a phone while sitting on a bench. This inaccurate information could lead to different consequences in contexts where accuracy is critical.
What causes hallucinations
Engineers build AI systems by gathering massive amounts of data and feeding it into a computational system that detects patterns in the data. The system develops methods for responding to questions or performing tasks based on those patterns.
Supply an AI system with 1,000 photos of different breeds of dogs, labeled accordingly, and the system will soon learn to detect the difference between a poodle and a golden retriever. But feed…
