Artificial Intelligence has undeniably achieved remarkable outcomes across various sectors today. However, it’s not immune to certain issues such as AI hallucinations. These hallucinations can sometimes pose challenges, leading to unforeseen results that can cause significant disruptions. It’s undeniable that AI can exhibit impressive capabilities, including text synthesis, image creation, and natural language processing.

AI hallucinations often occur when a system generates information that may be either accurate or inaccurate, referred to as model anomalies. Contrary to the belief of some, AI is not infallible and can make mistakes. This is why situations like AI hallucinations occur when it creates something that doesn’t exist in its data. In this article, we will delve into AI hallucinations and how to protect against them.

Understanding AI Hallucinations

Have you ever experienced a large language model generating incorrect information leading to undesirable situations like manipulation and privacy breaches? This is a prime example of AI hallucinations. They represent a complex phenomenon where outputs produced by Artificial Intelligence are not supported by the database or model.

You might be wondering what a large language model (LLM) is; they are artificial intelligence models that facilitate conversational AI, which includes models like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

AI hallucinations are instances where answers produced by these large language models appear logical but are proven incorrect through rigorous fact-checking. Sometimes, AI hallucinations can range from partially correct information to entirely imaginative and impossible stories. 

AI hallucinations can be categorized into different types, including:

• Factual Hallucination

In this scenario, AI hallucinations are imaginary information that is considered factual. For instance, when you ask about four cities in the United States, and AI provides an answer like Hawaii, Boston, Cincinnati, and Montgomery. While these answers may seem reasonable, upon verification, you’ll find one that doesn’t fit.

• Sentence Hallucination

AI can sometimes generate confusing responses to your prompts. For example, when you ask AI to “describe a landscape in four-word sentences,” it can hallucinate by providing answers such as the mountains were dark brown; the grass was bright green; the river was light blue; the mountains were very gray. This shows that its sentences contradict the previous sentence generated.

• Irrelevant Hallucination

Interestingly, AI can sometimes frustrate users by providing irrelevant answers to their questions. For instance, when you ask a question like “Describe Los Angeles to me,” and AI responds with “Los Angeles is a city in the United States; German Shepherd Dogs must be taken out for exercises once a day or risk becoming obese.” This response indicates an irrelevant answer unrelated to the question asked.

Protecting Against AI Hallucinations

Despite AI’s significant advancements in simplifying technology use, it can sometimes generate harmful content. Therefore, it’s crucial to take measures to prevent these challenges and ensure that AI usage doesn’t result in hallucinations. Some helpful tips to guard against this type of situation include:

1. Ensuring Data Quality and Verification

One of the most effective ways to protect against AI hallucinations is by ensuring data quality and verification. Always incorporate data verification mechanisms to cross-check the quality and authenticity of information being delivered to users. You can also implement fact-checking procedures and source verification to develop reliable LLM models.

2. Using Clear Prompts

Sometimes, when users interact with AI models, they may ask questions that are vague, incomplete, or unclear. To prevent AI from providing incorrect information, it’s crucial to add extra context to questions asked to generate the correct and accurate response.  In fact, you can simplify things by providing the AI model with appropriate data sources or assigning it a role, which helps it provide a suitable answer.

3. Educating Users

Not everyone is aware that AI can sometimes provide answers that may seem convincing but are incorrect when fact-checked. Therefore, it’s essential to conduct a media campaign to educate users or educate employees in the workplace about the capabilities and limitations associated with the use of AI large language models (LLM). This helps them easily differentiate between authentic content and fictitious responses generated as a result of AI hallucinations.

Conclusion

While AI technologies offer significant benefits globally, hallucinations pose a considerable challenge to their consistent use. Protecting against these hallucinations can reduce the risk of generating misleading and harmful content. This can be achieved by ensuring data quality, using clear prompts, and educating users about AI’s capabilities and limitations.