What a Hallucination Is (and Why AI Sounds So Sure)

Transcript

A chatbot can be totally confident and totally wrong at the same time. There's a word for that.

It's called a hallucination: smooth, specific, confident text that isn't true.

Here's why it happens. A chatbot writes by predicting the next likely word from an enormous pile of writing. Nothing in that checks whether the sentence is true.

When a lot has been written about something, its guesses are usually right. When hardly anything has, it's still guessing. Take Ismay, Montana. Population 17. Almost nobody writes about it. A chatbot might tell you 19, as of the 2020 census. Nineteen is real. It's the 2010 count. A real number on the wrong label.

And it says that in the same steady voice it uses for everything else. That's why AI sounds so sure. Confidence is a writing style, not proof.

One more thing. It isn't lying. Lying means knowing the truth and choosing to say something else. A chatbot doesn't know the truth. It knows what sounds right.