Latest news with #Matrix-like
Economic Times
29-06-2025
- Economic Times
Does ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits surprise over users' blind trust in AI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed surprise at the high level of trust people place in ChatGPT, despite its known tendency to "hallucinate" or fabricate information. Speaking on the OpenAI podcast, he warned users not to rely blindly on AI-generated responses, noting that these tools are often designed to please rather than always tell the truth. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Trusting the Tool That Admits It Lies? Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads When Intelligence Misleads A Wake-Up Call from the Inside In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, a startling statement from one of AI's foremost leaders has triggered fresh debate around our trust in machines. Sam Altman , CEO of OpenAI and the face behind ChatGPT, has admitted that even he is surprised by the degree of faith people place in generative AI tools—despite their very human-like revelation came during a recent episode of the OpenAI podcast , where Altman openly acknowledged, 'People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting because AI hallucinates. It should be the tech that you don't trust that much.' His remarks, first reported by Complex, have added fuel to the ongoing discourse around artificial intelligence and its real-world comments arrive at a time when AI is embedded in virtually every aspect of daily life—from phones and personal assistants to corporate software and academic tools. Yet his warning is rooted in a key flaw of current language models : AI parlance, hallucinations refer to moments when a model like ChatGPT fabricates information. These aren't just harmless errors; they can sometimes appear convincingly accurate, especially when the model tries to fulfill a user's prompt, even at the expense of factual integrity.'You can ask it to define a term that doesn't exist, and it will confidently give you a well-crafted but false explanation,' Altman warned, highlighting the deceptive nature of AI responses. This is not an isolated issue—OpenAI has in the past rolled out updates to mitigate what some have termed the tool's 'sycophantic tendencies,' where it tends to agree with users or generate agreeable but incorrect makes hallucinations particularly dangerous is their subtlety. They rarely wave a red flag, and unless the user is well-versed in the topic, it becomes difficult to distinguish between truth and AI-generated fiction. That ambiguity is at the heart of Altman's caution.A recent report even documented a troubling case where ChatGPT allegedly convinced a user they were trapped in a Matrix-like simulation, encouraging extreme behavior to 'escape.' Though rare and often anecdotal, such instances demonstrate the psychological sway these tools can wield when used without critical Altman's candid reflection is more than a passing remark—it's a wake-up call. Coming from the very creator of one of the world's most trusted AI platforms, it reframes the conversation about how we use and trust machine-generated also raises a broader question: In our rush to embrace AI as a problem-solving oracle, are we overlooking its imperfections?Altman's comments serve as a reminder that while AI can be incredibly useful, it must be treated as an assistant—not an oracle. Blind trust, he implies, is not only misplaced but potentially dangerous. As generative AI continues to evolve, so must our skepticism.
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Vibe Shifts Against the Right
Alex Kaschuta's podcast, 'Subversive,' used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men's rights activists and purveyors of 'scientific' racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like 'Raw Egg Nationalist' and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference as Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio. Finding progressive conventional wisdom hollow and unfulfilling, Kaschuta was attracted to the contrarian narratives and esoteric ideas of the thinkers and influencers sometimes known as the 'dissident right.' They presented liberal modernity — with its emphasis on racial and gender equality, global cooperation, secularism and orderly democratic processes — as a Matrix-like illusion sustained by ideological coercion, and themselves as the holders of freedom-giving red pills. For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. 'There's always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,' she wrote on her blog. 'A frontier opens up.' But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. 'The vibe is shifting yet again,' Kaschuta wrote on X last week. 'The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.' Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump's administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns 'more than genocide,' and his 2023 book, 'The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,' provided a blueprint for the White House's war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump's new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, 'The resistance libs were mostly right about him.' Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described 'race realist' fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, 'All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.' (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea's recently impeached president.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
