AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay
AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay
An AI leaderboard suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates. Experts say the problem is bigger than that
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To be fair, humans tend to hallucinate too.
I asked a local Ai chatbot DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Quen-14B:
Does Ai hallucinate and is it getting worse? Answer in one paragraph.
Answer:
AI does exhibit a form of "hallucination" where it generates plausible but incorrect information, particularly when faced with uncertainty or creative prompts beyond its training scope. This phenomenon occurs as AI constructs logical-sounding answers using available data, even if those answers aren't accurate. While advancements in AI make these hallucinations more convincing and harder to detect due to improved coherence, the issue isn't worsening in severity but rather evolving in how it presents itself.
I think the difference is that humans are sometimes aware of it. A human will likely say, I don't know what Kanye West did in 2018. While the AI is very likely to make up something. And also in contrast to a human this will likely be phrased like a Wikipedia article. While you can often look a human in the eyes and know whether they tell the truth or lie, or are uncertain. Not always, and we also tell untrue things, but I think the hallucinations are kind of different in several ways.
I mean lot of stuff is written in forums and social media, where people hallucinate. Or even in real life if you talk to one. Its normal for a human to pick up something in their life, later talk about it as a fact, regardless of where they learned it (tv, forum, videogame, school). Hallucinations are part of our brain.
Sometimes being aware of the hallucination issue is still a hallucination. Sometimes we are also aware of the hallucination an Ai makes, because its obvious or we can check it. And also there are Ai chatbots who "talk" and phrase in a more human natural sounding way. Not all of them sound obvious robotic.
Just for the record, I'm skeptical of Ai technology... not biggest fan. Please don't fork me. :D
Yeah, sure. No offense. I mean we have different humans as well. I got friends who will talk about a subject and they've read some article about it and they'll tell me a lot of facts and I rarely see them make any mistakes at all or confuse things. And then I got friends who like to talk a lot, and I better check where they picked that up.
I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I definitely make mistakes. But sometimes my brain manages to store where I picked something up and whether that was speculation, opinion or fact, along with the information itself. I've had professors who would quote information verbatim and tell roughly where and in which book to find it.With AI I'm currently very cautious. I've seen lots of confabulated summaries, made-up facts. And if designed to, it'll write it in a professional tone. I'm not opposed to AI or a big fan of some applications either. I just think it's still very far away from what I've seen some humans are able to do.