AI hallucinations? What could go wrong?
Oops. Gotta revise my summer reading list. Those exciting offerings plucked from a special section of The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper and reported last week don't exist. The freelancer who created the list used generative artificial intelligence for help and several of the books and many of the quotes that gushed about them were made up by the AI.
These are the most recent and high-profile AI hallucinations to make it into the news. We expect growing pains as new technology matures but, oddly and perhaps inextricably, that problem appears to be getting worse with AI. The notion that we can't ensure that AI will produce accurate information is, uh, 'disturbing' if we intend to integrate that product so deeply into our daily lives that we can't live without it. The truth might not set you free, but it seems like a prerequisite for getting through the day.
An AI hallucination is a phenomenon by which a large language model (LLM) such as a generative AI chatbot finds patterns or objects that simply don't exist and responds to queries with nonsensical or inaccurate answers. There are many explanations for these hallucinations — bad data, bad algorithms, training biases — but no one knows what produces a specific response.
Given the spread of AI from search tools to the ever-more prominent role it takes in ordinary tasks (checking grammar or intellectual grunt work in some professions), that's not only troubling but dangerous. AI is being used in medical tests, legal writings, industrial maintenance and failure in any of those applications could have nasty consequences.
We'd like to believe that eliminating such mistakes is part of the development of new technologies. When they examined the persistence of this problem, tech reporters from The New York Times noted that researchers and developers were saying several years ago that 'AI hallucinations would be solved. Instead, they're appearing more often and people are failing to catch them.'
Tweaking models helped reduce hallucinations. But AI is now using 'new reasoning systems,' which means that it ponders questions for microseconds (or maybe seconds for hard questions) longer and that seems to be creating more mistakes. In one test, hallucination rates for newer AI models reached 79%. While that is extreme, most systems hallucinated in double-digit percentages.
More worryingly, because the systems are using so much data, there is little hope that human researchers can figure out what is going on and why. The NYT cited Amr Awadallah, chief executive of Vectara, a startup that builds AI tools for businesses, who warned that 'Despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate.' He concluded 'That will never go away.'
That was also the conclusion of a team of Chinese researchers who noted that 'hallucination represents an inherent trait of the GPT model' and 'completely eradicating hallucinations without compromising its high-quality performance is nearly impossible.' I wonder about the 'high quality' of that performance when the results are so unreliable.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, professors Ian McCarthy, Timothy Hannigan and Andre Spicer last year warned of the 'epistemic risks of botshit,' the made-up, inaccurate and untruthful chatbot content that humans uncritically use for tasks.
It's a quick step from botshit to bullshit. (I am not cursing for titillation but am instead referring to the linguistic analysis of philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his best-known work, 'On Bullshit.') John Thornhill beat me to the punch last weekend in his Financial Times column by pointing out the troubling parallel between AI hallucinations and bullshit. Like a bullshitter, a bot doesn't care about the truth of its claims but wants only to convince the user that its answer is correct, regardless of the facts.
Thornhill highlighted the work of Sandra Wachter and two colleagues from the Oxford Internet Institute who explained in a paper last year that 'LLMs are not designed to tell the truth in any overriding sense... truthfulness or factuality is only one performance measure among many others such as 'helpfulness, harmlessness, technical efficiency, profitability (and) customer adoption.' '
They warned that a belief that AI tells the truth when combined with the tendency to attribute superior capabilities to technology creates 'a new type of epistemic harm.' It isn't the obvious hallucinations we should be worrying about but the 'subtle inaccuracies, oversimplifications or biased responses that are passed off as truth in a confident tone — which can convince experts and nonexperts alike — that posed the greatest risk.'
Comparing this output to Frankfurt's 'concept of bullshit,' they label this 'careless speech' and write that it 'causes unique long-term harms to science, education and society, which resists easy quantification, measurement and mitigation.'
While careless speech was the most sobering and subtle AI threat articulated in recent weeks, there were others. A safety test conducted by Anthropic, the developer of the LLM Claude, on its newest AI models revealed 'concerning behavior' in many dimensions. For example, the researchers discovered the AI 'sometimes attempting to find potentially legitimate justifications for requests with malicious intent.' In other words, the software tried to please users who wanted it to answer questions that would create dangers — such as creating weapons of mass destruction — even though it had been instructed not to do so.
The most amusing — in addition to scary — danger was the tendency of the AI 'to act inappropriately in service of goals related to self-preservation.' In plain speak, the AI blackmailed an engineer that was supposed to take the AI offline. In this case, the AI was given access to email that said it would be replaced by another version and email that suggested that the individual was having an extramarital affair. In 84% of cases, the AI said it would reveal the affair if the engineer went ahead with the replacement. (This was a simulation, so no actual affair or blackmail occurred.)
We'll be discovering more flaws and experiencing more frustration as AI matures. I doubt that those problems will slow its adoption, however. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, anticipates far deeper integration of the technology into daily life, with people turning to AI for therapy, shopping and even casual conversation. He believes that AI can 'fill the gap' between the number of friendships many people have and that which they want. He's putting his money where his mouth is, having announced at the beginning of the year that Meta would invest as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure.
That is a little over 10% of the estimated $500 billion that has been spent in the U.S. on private investment for AI between 2013 to 2024. Global spending last year is reckoned to have topped $100 billion.
Also last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that he had purchased former Apple designer Jony Ive's company io in a bid to develop AI 'companions' that will re-create the digital landscape as did the iPhone when it was first released. They believe that AI requires a new interface and phones won't do the trick; indeed, the intent, reported the Wall Street Journal, is to wean users from screens.
The product will fit inside a pocket and be fully aware of a user's surroundings and life. They plan to ship 100 million of the new devices 'faster than any company has ever shipped before.'
Call me old-fashioned but I am having a hard time putting these pieces together. A hallucination might be just what I need to resolve my confusion.
Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. His new book on the geopolitics of high-tech is expected to come out from Hurst Publishers this fall.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
7 hours ago
- Japan Times
Trade war cuts global economic growth outlook: OECD
The OECD slashed its annual global growth forecast on Tuesday, warning that U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs blitz would stifle the world economy — hitting the United States especially hard. After 3.3% growth last year, the world economy is now expected to expand by a "modest" 2.9% in 2025 and 2026, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said. In its previous report in March, the OECD had forecast growth of 3.1% for 2025 and 3.0% for 2026. Since then, Trump has launched a wave of tariffs that has rattled financial markets. "The global outlook is becoming increasingly challenging," said the OECD, an economic policy group of 38 mostly wealthy countries. It said "substantial increases" in trade barriers, tighter financial conditions, weaker business and consumer confidence, and heightened policy uncertainty will all have "marked adverse effects on growth" if they persist. The OECD downgraded its 2025 growth forecast for the United States from 2.2% to 1.6%. The world's biggest economy is expected to slow further next year to 1.5%. Trump, who has insisted that the tariffs would spark a manufacturing revival and restore a U.S. economic "Golden Age," posted on his Truth Social platform before the OECD report's publication: "Because of Tariffs, our Economy is BOOMING!" The OECD holds a ministerial meeting in Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday. U.S. and EU trade negotiators are expected to hold talks on the sidelines of the gathering after Trump threatened to hit the European Union with 50percent tariffs. The Group of Seven advanced economies is also holding a meeting focused on trade. "For everyone, including the United States, the best option is that countries sit down and get an agreement," OECD chief economist Alvaro Pereira said in an interview. "Avoiding further trade fragmentation is absolutely key in the next few months and years," Pereira said. Trump imposed in April a baseline tariff of 10% on imports from around the world. He unveiled higher tariffs on dozens of countries but has paused them until July to allow time for negotiations. The U.S. president has also imposed 25percent tariffs on cars and now plans to raise those on steel and aluminum to 50% on Wednesday. In the OECD report, Pereira warned that "weakened economic prospects will be felt around the world, with almost no exception." He added that "lower growth and less trade will hit incomes and slow job growth." The outlook "has deteriorated" in the United States after the economy expanded by a robust 2.8% last year, the report said. The effective tariff rate on U.S. merchandise imports has gone from 2% in 2024 to 15.4%, the highest since 1938, the OECD said. The higher rate and policy uncertainty "will dent household consumption and business investment growth," the report said. The OECD also blamed "high economic policy uncertainty, a significant slowdown in net immigration and a sizeable reduction in the federal workforce." While annual inflation is expected to "moderate" among the Group of 20 economies to 3.6% in 2025 and 3.2% in 2026, the United States is "an important exception." U.S. inflation is expected to accelerate to just under 4% by the end of the year, two times higher than the Federal Reserve's target for consumer price increases. The OECD slightly reduced its growth forecast for China — which was hit with triple-digit U.S. tariffs that have been temporarily lowered — from 4.8% to 4.7% this year. Another country with a sizeable downgrade is Japan. The OECD cut the country's growth forecast from 1.1% to 0.7%. The outlook for the eurozone economy, however, remains intact at 1% growth. "There is the risk that protectionism and trade policy uncertainty will increase even further and that additional trade barriers might be introduced," Pereira wrote. "According to our simulations, additional tariffs would further reduce global growth prospects and fuel inflation, dampening global growth even more," he said.
NHK
9 hours ago
- NHK
OECD cuts global GDP growth projection to 2.9%
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has downgraded its growth forecast for the global economy this year to 2.9 percent, citing the impact of tariffs by the administration of US President Donald Trump. The new projection, contained in the OECD's latest economic outlook, is down by 0.2 percentage points from its March projection. The OECD says the forecast is based on the assumption that Trump will maintain the tariff measures he launched up to mid-May. They include additional levies on automobiles, steel and aluminum, as well as a baseline 10-percent duty on countries and regions. The organization forecasts the US economy will grow 1.6 percent this year, down by 0.6 points from the previous projection, as tariffs suppress income increases. The OECD trimmed its growth projection for China by 0.1 point to 4.7 percent, lowered the figure for Japan by 0.4 points to 0.7 percent, and maintained its forecast for the Eurozone at 1 percent. The organization warns if the US raises its tariffs even further, it could promote retaliatory measures by the country's trade partners. It warns that this would cause downward pressure on corporate and household spending around the world.
Japan Times
16 hours ago
- Japan Times
China's rare earths grip gives Xi leverage in U.S. trade duel
After the U.S. and China agreed in Geneva to lower tariffs from astronomical heights, tensions are now surging over access to chips and rare earths. And Beijing increasingly appears to have an edge. President Donald Trump on Friday accused China of violating the agreement struck last month, and sought a call with Xi Jinping to sort things out. The main sticking point appears to be critical minerals, with U.S. officials complaining Beijing hadn't sped up exports needed for cutting-edge electronics. The U.S. has said the decision to reduce tariffs hinged on a Chinese agreement to lift controls on some rare earths. "It's going to require a discussion between the presidents of the two countries,' Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender said Monday in a brief interview. As China keeps constraints on metals critical to America's national security, Washington is ramping up its own tech restrictions. Over the past three weeks, the U.S. has barred the shipping of critical jet engine parts to China, throttled Beijing's access to chip-design software and slapped fresh curbs on Huawei chips. That's sparked anger in the world's second-largest economy. Chinese officials on Monday vowed to respond and accused the U.S. of undermining the Geneva consensus, dimming the chance of a leaders call. For years, Washington was believed to have the advantage over China in the fight for technological dominance thanks to its grip on semiconductor supply chains. Xi has shown he's ready to fight back, in part by tightening controls over critical minerals in a bid to force the U.S. into easing its restrictions. While the Trump administration has shown little sign of relenting on chip curbs, it has discovered replacing China as a supplier of rare earths could take years and cause pain for key industries. The Asian nation produces almost 70% of the world's metals crucial for making fighter jets, nuclear reactor control rods and other critical technology. China is gaining ground in the standoff, according to Cory Combs, associate director at consultancy Trivium China who specializes in supply chains. Washington is still a decade away from securing rare earths independently from Beijing, while Chinese firms have developed capable alternatives to most U.S. chips, he said. U.S. President Donald Trump (left) and Chinese leader Xi Jinping | Bloomberg "China's leverage is more durable than a lot of the U.S. leverage at this stage,' he added. "I'm not sure if this works out well for the U.S..' The dispute has the potential to endanger the fragile trade truce between Washington and Beijing. In theory, tariffs could snap back to more than 100% after the 90-day negotiating period. Trump has incentive to avoid that, after the U.S. economy shrank at the start of the year and markets panicked under the weight of huge tariffs. Supply-chain warfare As part of the agreement struck in Switzerland, China promised to remove or suspend "non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States' after Trump announced punitive duties in April. The Chinese government did not elaborate on what that entailed. Rare-earth exporters must apply for permits from the Ministry of Commerce. That process is opaque and difficult to verify, allowing officials to turn it on and off again with little visibility from the outside world. The paperwork involved has caused hold-ups, which are only now showing signs of easing. "We are seeing some approvals come through — certainly slower than industry would like,' said Michael Hart, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. "Some of the delay is related to China working through their new system.' For some U.S. firms, the metals can't flow fast enough. Ford temporarily shuttered a factory in Chicago last month because it ran short of rare earth components. At a long-running U.S. defense aviation conference Combs recently attended, rare earths were a top talking point. Attendees took the threat "very seriously,' he said. Such concerns show why export controls have become a central pillar of China's supply-chain warfare: They can hurt U.S. industries while causing little harm at home. Tariffs, in comparison, can be costly both for Chinese manufacturers and consumers. Giving Xi even greater leverage, the impact of China's rare earths controls aren't limited to American importers. India's largest electric scooter maker, Bajaj Auto, warned last week that the country's vehicle production will take a hit as early as July if China doesn't resume shipments. "Supplies and stocks are getting depleted as we speak,' said the firm's executive director Rakesh Sharma. Over 30 such applications have been made for shipping to Indian companies — and none have been approved so far, Sharma added. Companies from another large Asian importer only started getting permits last week, according to an official from the country who asked not to be named. China's squeeze on all countries highlights another risk for Trump: Strategic U.S. sectors, such as batteries and semiconductors, depend on South Korea and Japan for components. If Beijing cuts off those U.S. allies from rare earths, American firms could face even more pain. Japan's top trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa called rare earths "undoubtedly a critical theme for economic security,' after emerging Friday from his latest round of trade negotiations with U.S. counterparts. Next battleground Critical minerals were flagged as the next battleground in U.S.-China ties at the height of Trump's first trade war, when Xi visited one of his country's biggest permanent magnet producers — a trip widely seen as an implied threat. In July 2023, Beijing followed through by slapping export curbs on gallium and germanium — minerals used to make semiconductors — after the U.S. sought to restrict China's access to artificial intelligence chips. Miners at the Bayan Obo mine in Inner Mongolia, China, in 2011 | REUTERS Recognizing the danger, the U.S. Department of Defense has pledged to develop a complete mine-to-magnet rare earth supply chain for all domestic defense needs by 2027. A lack of commercially viable natural reserves, few engineers trained in the extraction process and limited numbers of companies able to compete at the industry's thin price margins are just some of the challenges the department faces. The U.S. national security establishment has known about its dependency on China for years yet hasn't come up with a solution at scale, according to Liza Tobin, managing director of risk advisory firm Garnaut Global. Despite that, she said, the Trump adminstration isn't making concessions. "Over the last couple of weeks, you've seen them doubling down with this empowered Commerce Department strengthening and broadening the export controls,' she said. Catching up will depend on how deeply Washington is willing to spend. Trump is already tapping foreign capital. During the president's trip last month to the Middle East, MP Materials — the sole U.S. producer of rare earths — signed a deal with Saudi Arabia's top mining firm to develop a supply chain. The U.S. could also intensify cooperation with Australia's Lynas Rare Earths — the largest producer of separated rare earths outside of China, although that operation still sends some of its oxides to the Asian nation for refining. While capacity is building in Brazil, South Africa, Japan and Vietnam, they can't offer an immediate fix for U.S. firms. Beijing hasn't exhausted its leverage. Restrictions so far have targeted medium- and heavy-rare earths, which are concentrated in defense applications. Weaponizing light rare earths — such as neodymium and praseodymium — could deal an even bigger blow to the U.S. economy, as they're more widespread in consumer goods. For now, Xi is unlikely to pursue the most extreme options as it could invite blowback from vulnerable industries, said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. "Beijing's controls on rare earths are a warning against further escalation,' he added. "But if U.S.-China tensions worsen again, then Beijing may start to inflict real pain on U.S. defense supply chains.'
