Cambridge Dictionary picked “hallucinate” as its word of the year for 2023. It’s not a throwback to the acid-popping sixties, but the bizarre choice for when this new generation of AI chatbots, well, makes shit up.
But, as Naomi Klein wrote in May, “Why call the errors ‘hallucinations’ at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches?”
I can‘t agree more. Talk about cultural appropriation. The hippies would sue if they, well, like, were able to get it together after all these years.
Hallucination, says Klein, refers to the “mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms”. But the real “warped hallucinations” are being had by the tech CEOs who “unleashed” AI chatbots.
“These folks are just tripping,” Klein writes. “Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanisation. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive.”
Hallucinate is an apt word for last year, for other reasons, and certainly in South Africa, where #loadshitting blackouts were the worst they’ve ever been. It’s a word that sums up how so many of us felt about the things we saw last year. Surely, they weren’t real, we say to ourselves because they were so surreal.
In the same week of December that the Sherrif of the court arrived at Luthuli House to collect on a R150 million debt judgement, the broke ANC’s cabinet ministers announced a $200 million (R3.8 billion) deal with sanctioned Russian bank Gazprom and then a 2,500MW nuclear deal. Days later news broke that the ruling party’s MPs would rush through the Electoral Matters Amendment Bill over the Christmas period. It will also have public hearings at the same time as contentious new home affairs legislation, meaning less time for public participation, according to News24.
What does this bill enable? The broke ANC’s president – also the country’s president – will be able to set the limits for donations to political parties and from what amount these must be publicly declared.
I feel like we’ve experienced an economic coup – all to keep the ANC in power and to pay off its R150 million debt before this year’s election. Say it ain’t so.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last year: “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems.”
Indeed, generative AI isn’t always as good as it seems. Apart from hallucinations, the video launch of Google’s new AI engine called Gemini – which “highlights some of our favourite interactions with Gemini” according to the official demo video – was “faked,” TechCrunch concluded.
What seemed like a smooth video was actually many still images, with Google admitting “We made a few edits to the demo (we’ve been upfront and transparent about this)” – something TechCrunch points out the search giant did not admit until Bloomberg noticed.
Gemini underpins Google’s Chatbot called Bard, which made a mistake when it was launched last February and saw $100 billion wiped off its share price. Bard’s mistake – not knowing when the first photograph of a planet outside of our solar system was taken, which was 19 years ago – isn’t a hallucination. It‘s just a mistake.
- This column first appeared in Financial Mail.