November 15th 2023.
Have you heard of the new word of the year? It's 'hallucinate' and it was recently named by the Cambridge Dictionary. This word was chosen because of the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and Grok that are capable of generating prose that can be mistaken for human writing.
These tools are trained to write by crunching through large amounts of written information, but they can also produce false information with no basis in reality. This has been given the new definition of 'When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.'
ChatGPT is now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and other phrases and words associated with AI are also in the Cambridge Dictionary. These include 'large language model' and 'GenAI'.
Dr Henry Shevlin, an AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge, said that the use of the term 'hallucinate' to refer to mistakes by systems like ChatGPT shows how people are anthropomorphising AI. He also said that inaccurate or misleading information is not only a human product, and that AI can produce it as well.
In addition to 'hallucinate', other words that experienced a spike in public interest and an increase in the number of searches on the Cambridge Dictionary this year include 'implosion', 'ennui', 'grifter', 'GOAT', 'shadowban', 'vibe check', 'affrilachian', 'range anxiety', 'UBI', and 'AI hallucinations'.
AI hallucinations can be somewhat nonsensical, but they can also seem entirely plausible. However, they can lead to serious problems in the real world. When Google’s Bard made a mistake in a promotional video, it caused Alphabet to lose $100 billion in market value.
ChatGPT has also caused issues, such as when it accused an Australian mayor of bribery and a US law professor of sexual misconduct.
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary’s Publishing Manager, said that the fact that AI can hallucinate reminds us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these tools. She also said that human expertise is more important than ever to create up-to-date information that AI can be trained on.
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