User Beware – ‘ChatGPT Hallucinated Wildly‘
At the end of the day all AI is trained and prompted by human brains that may be biased, moody, greedy, lazy or even hallucinating so it’s no surprise that AI and ChatGPT can, and do, mimic these traits. For example …
“A lawyer asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported an argument they were trying to make. ChatGPT, as it often does, hallucinated wildly—it invented several supporting cases out of thin air. When the lawyer was asked to provide copies of the cases in question, they turned to ChatGPT for help again—and it invented full details of those cases, which they duly screenshotted and copied into their legal filings. At some point, they asked ChatGPT to confirm that the cases were real... and ChatGPT said that they were. They included screenshots of this in another filing. The judge is furious. Many of the parties involved are about to have a very bad time.“
FOOTNOTE: The judge subsequently fined the lawyer $5000.
Lesson 22 DFQ: What is your biggest real fear when you think about AI and ChatGPT?
Next Lesson: The Solution
My fear is that as is the case in politics now it is difficult to discern what is true and what is false…………the fact that AI can hallucinate and fill in gaps with falsehoods exaccerbates this – nor does it provide counter factuals or alternative opinions……..
My biggest fear is that society will lose the ability to separate fact from falsehoods in written materials, photographs, videos and sound recordings. Without strong safeguards we could reach a situation where it becomes impossible to verify the accuracy and/or authorship of all types of records. If this were to occur we could expect all our key profession and trades to lose the ability to function effectively.
The only thing we have left (that machines cannot do) is our ability to think new thoughts, to learn and imagine new paths forward – why would we want to outsource that? My biggest fear is that AI will accelerate what has been going on for decades, that we will fully mistaken speed, scale, quantity and accessability of data and information for quality and usefulness – data over thinking is shortcut to peril