Robyn Anderson jokes about AI chatbots gone wrong: a Microsoft bot told someone to leave his wife, and another confidently invented a Belgian chemist named Antoine de Machelet who never existed. She warns that AI systems confidently produce false facts while acting unpredictably.
But it is a little troubling that Microsoft couldn't explain why its chatbot tried to get that guy to leave his wife. If the next time that you opened a Word doc, Clippy suddenly appeared and said, "Pretend I'm not even here," and then started furiously masturbating while watching you type, you'd be pretty weirded out if Microsoft couldn't explain why. And that is not the only case where an AI program has performed in unexpected ways. You've probably already seen examples of chatbots making simple mistakes or getting things wrong. But perhaps more worrying are examples of them confidently spouting false information, something which AI experts refer to as hallucinating. One reporter asked the chatbot to write an essay about the Belgian chemist and political philosopher Antoine de Machelet, who does not exist, by the way.
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