Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is “hallucinate”. It’s not a throwback to the acid-popping 1960s but the bizarre choice for when this new generation of AI chatbots, well, makes stuff up.
But, as writer Naomi Klein wrote in May: “Why call the errors ‘hallucinations’ at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches?”
I agree. Talk about cultural expropriation. The hippies would sue if they were able to get it together after all these years.
Hallucination, says Klein, refers to the “mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms”. But the real “warped hallucinations” are being had by the tech CEOs who “unleashed” AI chatbots.
“These folks are just tripping,” Klein writes. “Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanisation. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive.”
Hallucinate is an apt word of the year, for other reasons, and certainly in South Africa, where blackouts have been at their worst. It’s a word that sums up how so many of us have felt about the things we’ve seen in 2023. Surely, they can’t have been real, we say to ourselves, because they are so surreal.
The hippies would sue if they were able to get it together after all these years
In the week in December that the sheriff of the court arrived at Luthuli House to collect on a R150m debt judgment, the broke ANC’s cabinet ministers announced a $200m deal with Russia’s Gazprombank Africa and then a 2,500MW nuclear deal (read “with Russia”).
Days later news came that ANC MPs are rushing through the new Electoral Matters Amendment Bill over the Christmas period. It will have public hearings at the same time as those for contentious new home affairs legislation, meaning less time for public participation, according to News24.
What does this bill enable? The president will be able to set the limits for donations to political parties and declare from which amount these must be publicly declared.
I feel like we’ve experienced an economic coup — all to keep the ANC in power and to pay off its R150m debt before next year’s election.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this year: “No-one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems.”
Indeed, generative AI isn’t always as good as it seems. Apart from hallucinations, the video launch of Google’s new AI engine, called Gemini, which “highlights some of our favourite interactions with Gemini”, according to the official demo video, was “faked”, as online newspaper TechCrunch concluded.
What seemed like a smooth video was actually many still images. Google admitted “we made a few edits to the demo (we’ve been upfront and transparent about this)” — something TechCrunch points out the search giant did not admit until Bloomberg noticed.
Gemini underpins Google’s chatbot, called Bard, which made a mistake when it was launched in February and caused $100bn to be wiped off its share price. Bard’s mistake — not knowing when the first photograph of a planet outside our solar system was taken, which was 19 years ago — isn’t a hallucination. It’s just a mistake.
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa
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