AI Chatbots are like buses: you’ll wait half an hour in the rain with none in sight, then three come along all at once. In March 2023, OpenAI released its newest chatbot, GPT-4. It’s a name that sounds more like a rally car than an AI assistant but it heralds a new era in computing.
Google responded with Bard, its more grandly named search chatbot. Chinese search giant Baidu launched its cheeky-sounding Ernie Bot. Salesforce demoed its more serious sounding Einstein GPT chatbot. And Snapchat, not to be outdone, announced its My AI chatbot. It’s now fashionable for every tech platform and enterprise software company to have an AI chatbot providing an intelligent interface to their software. It may soon look and sound like the Hollywood movie Her. We will interact with our smart devices through AI chatbots. We will talk to them. They’ll understand complex and high-level commands. They will remember the context of our conversation. And they’ll intelligently do what we instruct them to do. We’re still working out what these chatbots can do. Some of it is magical. Writing a complaint letter to the council for an undeserved parking ticket. Or composing a poem for your colleague's 25th work anniversary. But some of it is more troublesome. Chatbots like ChatGPT or GPT-4 will, for example, make stuff up, confidently telling you truths, untruths and everything in-between. The technical term for this, according to experts, is “hallucination”.
The goal isn’t to eliminate hallucination. How else will a chatbot write that poem if it can’t hallucinate? The aim is to prevent the chatbot from hallucinating things that are untrue, especially when they are offensive, illegal or dangerous.
