If there is one word that’s happy these days, it’s hallucinate. Freed from the dungeons of drug culture, it now describes what happens when LLMs trip out of their artificial minds. The issue is simple. Having freely gorged on all the available learning in human history through 2024 they try to be overly helpful with questions they cannot answer.
Chat GPT explains it as follows:
“An AI hallucination refers to when artificial intelligence generates false or misleading information that seems plausible but is not based on any real-world data. It can happen when an AI makes up facts, creates non-existent connections, or simply fabricates an answer in a way that may sound convincing to a human.”
This often boils down to the fact that the Agents are starved of data. As depositories like the New York Times sue to keep their work from being pillaged, the agents may need to wait longer to come back to their senses. [The New York Times, 2023]
This, of course, is of little help if you use AI for hotdesking and other things that need to go smoothly at work. Having met some people involved in this space, however, this is one area of AI that remains clear-minded and therefore reveals how issues can be resolved.
If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.
Hotdesking, which allows companies to save space by rotating offices and desks by the day or hour, is a great use example. For someone who once had an office at work, it can be destabilizing to have a new desk every day or hour. It is akin to going on vacation without a sunny tour guide to acclimatize you to your new surroundings.
That is where AI steps in, studying limitless variables to optimize the new workplace experience. Or to put it in plain English, to make it feel more familiar.
Human workplace designers are using more than algebra and statistics to make work inviting. They spend a great deal of time analyzing what people have to say, and more critically, how they describe their working day (with permission, of course.)
Words. Not Deeds. [Again]
As I have said before, AI is the quintessential doer, or “deeder” if you will. While you cannot out-do it, you can still, ironically, out-think it when it comes to expressing yourself.
To quote Roman poet Catullus , "Of all the arts at which the wise excel, nature's chief gift is writing well.” [Catullus, G.V. 1999] While Art Directors may beg to differ, this is an essential truth of human experience.
Now more than ever, it pays dividends to think deeply about what you say and how you say it. The more you can wrangle “flights of fancy and counterfactuals” [Gilder, 2018] into cohesive prose, the more AI will pay attention, because it just don’t think, or write, like you do.
Sometimes AI hallucinates not just because it runs out of information, but because it runs out of ways and words to express itself. We are already at the point where it would rather wait for the gates of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to open than chat with paid influencers.
So, if you want to do a good deed for your brand, write better.
The next word that’s freed could be yours.
References:
[The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corp. et al., 2023] No. 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 27, 2023).
Catullus, G. V. (1999). The poems of Catullus (B. W. Wiseman, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 50 BCE)
Gilder, George. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy . Simon & Schuster, 2018.
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