Another AI Hallucination Before an Oregon Court

I’ve twice written about a lawyer coming into hot water when his filing before an Oregon court contained fabricated citations. He didn’t make up the citations. His artificial intelligence software did that without his knowledge. When AI makes stuff up, the euphemism fast becoming a technical term is “hallucination.”

It’s happened again, this time before the Oregon Supreme Court. Read the reporting on this by OPB here.

Folks, think of AI like it’s search. You still need to click on things and investigate.

There are a lot of time-saving benefits to be had from these new computational products, but the random mistakes they make should not be a surprise. David Hume first hammered home the basic problem of inductive reasoning in his 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature. 

AI is inductive reasoning. It observes correlations and reports them to you. That works great until you run into a black swan. AI hallucinations are black swan events. The more we use AI to find patterns, the more frequently it will recover spurious correlations. So, check your facts, everyone.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.