In Defense of AI Hallucinations

No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there's almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. In the middle of what seems like a carefully constructed answer, the LLM will slip in something that seems reasonable but is a total fabrication. Your typical chatbot can make disgraced ex-congressman George Santos look like Abe Lincoln. Since it looks inevitable that chatbots will one day generate the vast majority of all prose ever written, all the AI companies are obsessed with minimizing and eliminating hallucinations, or at least convincing the world the problem is in hand.