Why Humans Hallucinate too and what it means for AI.

A little background on false memories and a rant about paper straws.

The AI models have a well-documented behavior where they would return plausible-looking responses that are effectively “made up”. We call them hallucinations:

Typical reactions to this fact vary from “Haha, stupid AI” to “Sounds like my friend who watched too many conspiracy theory YouTube videos”.

Why Humans Hallucinate

We all have a mechanism called Source Monitoring, which I described in detail here:

The human brain is much more adept at remembering pieces of information than remembering where those pieces came from. In particular, it can easily confuse fiction with facts and treat hearsay as proof.

Many people will defend an “irrational” stance because the questionable media they consume become part of their lived experience. They can remember manufactured stories as happening to them because of source monitoring errors.

When your conspiracy-watching friend defends an irrational stance, he is defending the truth how he sees it. That truth has become a part of his memories, and he now has genuine trouble distinguishing reputable sourced materials from, well, junk. It has far-reaching implications, particularly around the dependability of eyewitness testimonies.

Source monitoring mechanism evolved in the times when the only fiction around was stories told near a fire. As such, the richness of the memory is an important cue:

Our brain count on the real memories (contrary to the imagined ones) typically having more texture, details, smells, colors, and other sensory data. Real memories also tend to include more emotion (according to what is called “encoding specificity rule”).

Why AI Hallucinates

An LLM equivalent of Source Monitoring is “Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback” – a process where people would spot-check some responses of the model and provide feedback. Reducing hallucinations is only one concern, and naturally -not all facts in the model can be checked.

LLMs do not have an internal tagging mechanism distinguishing produced tokens as coming from fictional sources or facts. But this is not a limitation of AI – we wouldn’t even know how to label all the content ourselves.

The fact that LLMs hallucinate is not an example of their inferiority – it’s a very human behavior. A one that we have failed to eradicate in humans.

A few things I’ve read

Bad UI Battles

Aleksandr has collected some of the best/worst UX from the BadUIBattles reddit, where designers compete to create the worst UX possible.

Make Google Docs actually nice to look at

Nate shares his tips on how to customize your default Google Docs experience to look fancy and elegant.

I have been using this setup for a few months now, and opening Google Docs is no longer depressing. In the article, you will learn how to:

1. Remove page breaks
2. Change the background color to anything except pure white
3. Choose different fonts (optional if you hate nice things)
4. Update your font colors
5. Set defaults so you never need to do this twice (unless you’re a masochist)

Paper straws are giving you cancer

I really, really hate paper straws. In case you needed more reasons to feel strongly, Arnold included a shocking revelation from a new study in his newsletter:

The paper was the short straw of the bunch, with chemicals detected in 90 percent of the brands tested. PFAs were found in 80 percent of bamboo straws, 75 percent of plastic straws, 40 percent of glass straws, and none of the steel straws. If you’re keeping score at home, steel was clearly the safest.

I hate paper straws so much that I carry a silicone rubber straw with me during the summer so that I can enjoy my espresso tonic without the depressing mushiness of the paper one. I prefer silicone over steel because it’s easier to carry without poking a hole in my pocket or somebody’s eye.

I checked the original study, and while I didn’t find any information about my favorite material, I got more bad news:

The presence of PFAS in plant-based straws shows that they are not necessarily biodegradable and that the use of such straws potentially contributes to human and environmental exposure of PFAS.

Get a steel straw now, put it in your glove compartment, and thank me in 5 months.