A New Paper Traces AI Hallucinations to Early Efforts to Mimic Creativity
Lindquist writes in Past and Present that AI pioneers intentionally injected randomness into algorithms designed to solve problems deterministically, in order to mimic creative thinking.
He traces the origins of AI hallucinations back to that early research and suggests that building machines to mimic human behavior will involve inevitable tradeoffs between creativity and predictability.
One popular route for adding irregularity to otherwise predictable computers was artificial, or random, neural networks.
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The randomness was not a bug in the original vision; it was the design. A machine built to solve problems deterministically might calculate, but a random neural network was supposed to surprise its makers.
The awkward implication is that the appetite for unexpected outputs sits near the thing we now call hallucination. If creativity and predictability trade off, making a model more reliable may also make it less capable of the unexpected.