Hallucination (artificial intelligence)
In artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination is a confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data.[1] For example, a hallucinating chatbot with no knowledge of Tesla's revenue might internally pick a random number (such as "$13.6 billion") that the chatbot deems plausible, and then go on to falsely and repeatedly insist that Tesla's revenue is $13.6 billion, with no sign of internal awareness that the figure was a product of its own imagination.[2]
Such phenomena are termed "hallucinations", in analogy with the phenomenon of hallucination in human psychology. Note that while a human hallucination is a percept by a human that cannot sensibly be associated with the portion of the external world that the human is currently directly observing with sense organs, an AI hallucination is instead a confident response by an AI that cannot be grounded in any of its training data.[1] AI hallucination gained prominence around 2022 alongside the rollout of certain large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Users complained that such bots often seemed to "sociopathically" and pointlessly embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content.[3] Another example of hallucination in artificial intelligence is when the AI or chatbot forget that they are one and claim to be human.[4]
Various researchers cited by Wired have classified adversarial hallucinations as a high-dimensional statistical phenomenon, or have attributed hallucinations to insufficient training data. Some researchers believe that some "incorrect" AI responses classified by humans as "hallucinations" in the case of object detection may in fact be justified by the training data, or even that an AI may be giving the "correct" answer that the human reviewers are failing to see. For example, an adversarial image that looks, to a human, like an ordinary image of a dog, may in fact be seen by the AI to contain tiny patterns that (in authentic images) would only appear when viewing a cat. The AI is detecting real-world visual patterns that humans are insensitive to.[6]
