#ai-hallucinations

#ai-hallucinations

Today, I'm talking with Sean Fitzpatrick, the CEO of LexisNexis, one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For years - including when I was in law school - LexisNexis was basically the library. It's where you went to look up case law, do legal research, and find the laws and precedents you would need to be an effective lawyer for your clients.

Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Before artificial intelligence had its big breakout, chatbots were those weird messaging tools that sat in the bottom corner of websites, rarely solving your problems and likely causing you more stress by blocking you from talking to a real person. But now, AI chatbots like have created a whole new category: It's search, but with conversation. You can use an AI chatbot as a thought partner, a research aid or a Google alternative for anything you want to know.

The judges had previously branded their wrong and subsequently withdrawn opinions as clerical errors. That lack of transparency undermined the judges' credibility, but both seem to have used the "clerical" excuse in a good faith effort to avoid throwing interns under the bus. According to Judge Neals, a law school intern performed legal research with ChatGPT, while Judge Wingate writes that a law clerk used Perplexity.

They hoped that the Sufi philosopher, famed for his acerbic wisdom, could mediate a dispute that had driven a wedge between them. Nasreddin listened patiently to the first villager's version of the story and, upon its conclusion, exclaimed, "You are absolutely right!" The second villager then presented his case. After hearing him out, Nasreddin again responded, "You are absolutely right!"

Robby Starbuck is suing Google, claiming that its AI search tools falsely linked him to sexual assault allegations and white nationalist Richard Spencer. This is the second case that Starbuck, known for his online campaigns against corporate diversity efforts, has brought against a major tech company over its AI products. In April, Starbuck sued Meta, claiming that its AI falsely insisted that he participated in the January 6th attack on the Capitol and that he had been arrested for a misdemeanor.

In the darker corners of the tech industry, an untold number of professionals have come to believe in a controversial theory known as Roko's basilisk, which holds that a future AI super intelligence would torture any human who didn't help it come into existence. Now, in a twist that should please any writer, the guy who's spearheading Meta's AI-powered smart glasses is named Rocco Basilico - which has delighted and freaked out some online observers.

Imagine an avid reader who one day flips through a summer book preview in their local paper. Among the books listed there is a novel by one of this reader's favorite writers, Isabel Allende. Intrigued, this reader heads to their local library to see if they have any copies of the novel, called Tidewater Dreams, in stock. Here's the problem: Tidewater Dreams doesn't actually exist; instead, it was part of an AI-generated article that included several nonexistent books by acclaimed

The admission came in a paper [PDF] published in early September, titled "Why Language Models Hallucinate," and penned by three OpenAI researchers and Santosh Vempala, a distinguished professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. It concludes that "the majority of mainstream evaluations reward hallucinatory behavior." Language models are primarily evaluated using exams that penalize uncertainty. The fundamental problem is that AI models are trained to reward guesswork, rather than the correct answer.

Each citation, each argument, each procedural decision is a mark upon the clay, an indelible impression. [I]n the ancient libraries of Ashurbanipal, scribes carried their stylus as both tool and sacred trust-understanding that every mark upon clay would endure long beyond their mortal span.

The pilot scheme allows AI chatbots to generate community notes to accelerate the speed and scale of Community Notes on X.