When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?
If we’ve learned any lesson from the internet, it’s that once something exists it never goes away.
Sure, people shouldn’t believe the output of their prompt. But if you’re generating that output, a site can use the API to generate a similar output for a similar request. A bot can generate it and post it to social media.
Yeah, don’t trust the first source you see. But if the search results are slowly being colonized by AI slop, it gets to a point where the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor it stops making sense to only blame the poor discernment of those trying to find the signal.
