AI hallucinations

Hallucinations are in the air. The New York Times has an unsurprising article about what results when chatbots hallucinate. And at Grammarphobia, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman look at the words hallucinate and hallucination as used in the field of artificial intelligence.

I left a comment on the Times article yesterday:

Why should any of this stuff be surprising? ChatGPT had me winning the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize ($100,000!) and had my wife, a composer and string player, as a world-famous pianist (before it removed us both). It mistakes the celebrated, fictional Lillian Mountweazel for a real person. It makes up lines of poetry, giving “The years upon my back like some great beast” as a line from Yeats’s “The Wild Swans of Coole.” When I asked about Edwin Mullhouse, as in Steven Millhauser’s (great) novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, it gave this account:

Edwin Mullhouse is the main character in the novel “The Breakthrough” by American author Jonathan Safran Foer. Edwin is an 11-year-old boy who dies suddenly and is remembered by his best friend, Jeffrey Eugenides, who recounts Edwin’s life in a fictional memoir.

I’m reminded of the YouTube clip giving an account of the Beatles from the year 3026, with John, Paul, Greg, and Scottie traveling from their native Linverton to perform at Ed Sullivan’s annual Woodstock festival.

I wrote “my wife,” not “Elaine Fine,” fearing that the Times might not okay a comment referencing another person by name. Tonight I discovered that ChatGPT has once again given us fictive accomplishments, awarding me a doctorate from UC Berkeley, “a large following on Twitter,” and authorship of Poetics of the Hive: Insect Metaphor in Literature and Digital Poetics: Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text and Writing in Programmable Media. Elaine and I must have met at Berekeley — she’s now described as having taught there. And she has a Guggenheim. These are our lives on artificial intelligence.

I still want my $100,000 back.

Related reading
All OCA ChatGPT posts

[The details in my Times comment all turn up in OCA ChatGPT posts. You can find the 3026 Beatles history here. It’s brilliant. I have never had a Twitter account. The books are real: the first is by Cristopher Hollingsworth; the second, by Loss Pequeño Glazier.]