AI hallucination: Unless you live an unplugged life, you’ve probably heard this term in the same breath as generative AI topics like ChatGPT. If you’ve wondered what those “hallucinations” are, and how they happen, we’ve got you covered in this blog.
An AI hallucination occurs when a large language model (LLM) used to generate output from an AI chatbot, search tool, or conversational AI application produces output that’s inaccurate, false, or misleading.
Things go awry with generative AI for various reasons. These include errors in the AI’s understanding or generation processes, overconfidence in its learned knowledge, training on data that doesn’t accurately represent the kind of tasks the AI is performing, and a lack of human feedback or oversight into system outputs.
Understanding what generative AI hallucinations are and why they happen is important for companies who want to use artificial intelligence effectively and with confidence. A generative AI tool is only as good as its training data, AI algorithms, and generative model allow it to be.
Why AI Hallucinations Happen
Hallucinations are a known GenAI headache that occurs with AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. For example, earlier this year ChatGPT famously made up fake legal quotes and citations which were used in an actual court case. The unfortunate lawyers who submitted the false information were fined $5,000.
Bard, Google’s introduction to the generative chatbot space, made up a “fact” about the James Webb Space Telescope during its livestream debut – an event attended by the media. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, lost $100 billion in market value after Reuter’s pointed out this unfortunate hallucination.
And Amazon’s Q, big tech’s most recent introduction into the AI chatbot space, debuted with a thud when, three days after its release, Amazon employees warned it was prone to “severe hallucinations” and privacy concerns.
An AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Jasper AI operates thanks to the integration of various technologies including LLMs for text generation and comprehension and natural language processing for interpreting and processing human language. Underpinning these functionalities are neural networks, which provide the computational framework for handling and analyzing the data.
There are inherent limitations in the way generative AI chatbots process and interpret information that cause hallucinations. These may manifest as:
- False assumptions – LLMs make assumptions based on patterns they’ve seen during training and these assumptions make them prone to hallucinations. This happens because they learn to associate words in specific contexts (e.g., “Paris” is always associated with “France”). The LLM might incorrectly assume this pattern applies in all contexts, leading to errors when the context deviates from the norm.
- Misinterpreting user intention – LLMs analyze user inputs based on word patterns and context, but lack a true understanding of human intentions or nuances. This can lead to situations where the model misinterprets the query, especially in complex, ambiguous, or nuanced scenarios, resulting in responses that don’t align with the user’s actual intent.
- Biases caused by training data – This is a big one — after all, garbage in, garbage out. LLMs learn from huge datasets that often contain cultural, linguistic, and political biases. The responses it generates are naturally going to reflect these biases, generating unfair, false, and skewed information.
- Overconfidence – LLMs often seem incredibly confident in their responses. They’re designed to respond without doubt or emotion. LLMs generate text based on statistical likelihoods without the ability to cross-reference or verify information. This leads to assertive statements like Bard’s confident assertion that the James Webb Telescope took the “very first images of exoplanets.” (It didn’t.) These models don’t have a mechanism to express uncertainty or seek clarification.
- An inability to reason – Unlike humans, LLMs don’t have true reasoning skills. They use pattern recognition and statistical correlations to generate a response. Without logical deduction or an understanding of causal relationships, they’re susceptible to generating nonsense, especially in situations that require a deep understanding of concepts or logical reasoning.
In an interview with the New York Times, ChatGPT’s former CEO Sam Altman affirmed that generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) like ChatGPT are bad at reasoning and this is why they make stuff up. Per Altman:
“I would say the main thing they’re bad at is reasoning. And a lot of the valuable human things require some degree of complex reasoning. They’re good at a lot of other things — like, GPT-4 is vastly superhuman in terms of its world knowledge. It knows more than any human has ever known. On the other hand, again, sometimes it totally makes stuff up in a way that a human would not.”
How to Mitigate AI Hallucinations
Introducing generative AI applications – and their potential for hallucinations – into your enterprise comes with some challenges. Public generative AI models in applications like ChatGPT pose huge privacy and security risks. For example, OpenAI may retain chat histories and other data to refine their models, potentially exposing your sensitive information to the public. They may also collect and retain user data like IP addresses, browser information, and browsing activities.
But using GenAI safely – and ensuring AI-generated content it produces is accurate, secure, and reliable – is possible. Here are some steps you can take to mitigate AI hallucinations and make AI output enterprise ready:
1. Create a secure environment
Establishing a digital environment that adheres to specific security standards and regulations helps prevent unauthorized access and use of enterprise data. You should operate your GenAI solution in a locked-down environment that complies with regulations like AICPA SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, Cloud Security Alliance, and ISO 27001.
2. Unify access to your content
Most companies store information across multiple databases, tools, and systems — all of this contributes to your overall knowledge base. You can use content connectors to create a unified index of your important data from all possible content sources (Slack, Salesforce, your intranet, etc.).
This creates an expansive and searchable knowledge base that ensures the AI language model outputs are comprehensive. Unifying content requires segmenting documents before routing them to the GenAI model, as we note in our ebook, GenAI Headaches: The Cure for CIOs:
“This involves maximizing the segmentation of documents as part of the grounding context process before they are routed to the GenAI model. The LLM then provides a relevant response from these divided chunks of information, based specifically on your organization’s knowledge. This contextualization plays an essential role in the security of generative responses. It ensures that the results of the AI system are relevant, accurate, consistent and safe.”
3. Retain data ownership and control
Complete ownership and control over your data, including index and usage analytics, keeps proprietary information safe. Ensure communication is secure by using encryption protocols like HTTPS and TLS endpoints that provide authentication, confidentiality, and security. Implement an audit trail to understand how the AI model is being used so you can create guidelines that promote responsible, ethical use of the system.
4. Verify accuracy of training data
Ensure the accuracy of training data and incorporate human intervention to validate the GenAI model’s outputs. Providing citations and links to source data introduces transparency and allows users to validate information for themselves.
5. Implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, is an AI framework that removes some of the limitations that tie an LLM to its training data. With RAG, an LLM can access updated knowledge and data based on a user query – a process called “grounding.” RAG gives companies greater control over what information can be used to answer a user query, pulling only the most relevant chunks from documents available in trusted internal sources and repositories.
6. Use the most up-to-date content
Regularly refresh, rescan, and rebuild content in content repositories across your enterprise to ensure that the searchable content is current and relevant. These three update operations ensure that GenAI outputs remain accurate.
7. Provide a consistent user experience
If you’re using GenAI for search, chat, and other use cases, you need to ensure that users get consistent answers. A unified search engine is the answer to this challenge. An intelligent search platform like Coveo uses AI and machine learning to identify, surface, and generate results and answers from a unified index of all your content, ensuring that information is relevant, current, and consistent across your digital channels.
Leveraging Enterprise-Ready Generative AI
Understanding and mitigating the phenomenon of AI hallucinations in generative AI is the only way to make a GenAI system enterprise ready. Hallucinations pose significant risks to your reputation, your data security, and your peace of mind.
Coveo has over a decade of experience in enterprise-ready AI. Our Relevance Cloud AI Platform provides a secure way for enterprises to harness GenAI while mitigating the risks of this innovative AI technology. Designed with security at its core, Coveo’s platform keeps generated content accurate, relevant, consistent, and safe. Features like auditable prompts and responses and secure content retrieval based on user access rights, safeguard sensitive information. Coveo is customizable and easy to align with specific business goals. This balance between innovation and security is essential for enterprises.
Get in touch with us to learn how Coveo can help you avoid AI hallucinations while benefiting from GenAI technology.