Why AI Keeps Making Stuff Up: The Science Behind LLM Hallucinations 🧠

Author(s): MahendraMedapati

Originally published on Towards AI.

Hook: When Smart AI Says Dumb Things 🤯

Picture this: You’re using ChatGPT to research Adam Tauman Kalai’s birthday for a project. The AI confidently tells you it’s March 7th. You ask again to double-check — now it says June 15th. One more time? January 1st.

The article discusses how AI models, even the most advanced ones, tend to “hallucinate” by generating plausible but incorrect responses, which becomes crucial for users to understand especially as AI assists in research and decision-making. This phenomenon is directly influenced by the way AI is trained, which often rewards guessing over acknowledging uncertainty. To address these issues, the article suggests implementing confidence-aware evaluations and careful handling of ambiguous questions, advocating for industry-wide changes in how models are assessed to promote better and more accurate AI behavior.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI