AI is not Hallucinating.

There has been a great deal of talk about AI systems hallucinating. It is part of an anthropomorphism narrative that obscures and distorts what could be a valuable debate about opportunities for all of us to do good things in the world with advances in technology. 

My personal fear is that just like in the 1990s where the emergence of the internet was seen as advancing great possibilities, it soon descended into predatory business models, and that delightful phrase you can search up – the “enshitification” of the internet (thanks to Cory Doctorow for that great insight).

I would advance another idea here. Every century takes a few years to find it’s character. The 20^th Century probably didn’t get started until the roaring twenties has been soured by the banking crash leading to the rise of Nazism and industrialised war. It seems to me that the 21^st Century started on the 10^th July 2023, after the warmest week in recent history. With war raging, the social death of the pandemic still echoing, and angst about AI now being fully able to eat many folks livelihoods. Welcome finally, to the new century. We are not passengers, or an audience, but participants. As Muhamed Ali once said, “don’t count the days, make the days count”!

This article is another step towards the book I am writing, that I hope will give people some conceptual tools to make their days count in this early dawn of the true 21^st Century. Happy Friday. 

Coming up

#AI as actionable insights for yourself and your business under #JabeOnAiDoubleEspresso; #CognitiveScience deliberations and thought provoking further reading under #JabeOnAiArabicaCappuccino; and valuable alternative perspectives on #artificialintelligence and learnings from Counter Cultural sources under #JabeOnAiEspressoMartini. 

You know you need it … so much dross being talked about #AI each and every day now!

Decerning reader you are blessed with good fortune… please ensure you put it to good use! 

Double Espresso

Key points: 

• Hallucination is an anthropomorphism.
• Machine Learning, is giving a probability of a pattern being a useful response to a query. Getting it wrong is a feature; not a bug; and certainly nothing like human hallucination is going on.
• Ironically, the concept of hallucination does give incredibly useful insights of how human consciousness, perception and reasoning works – more on this later.

Arabica Cappuccino

A discursive journey through some of the ideas and debate in this area.

I want to “meditate a little” on the anthropomorphisation going on right now.

From a couple of angles:

1. From the perspective of how wrong it is to describe machine learning systems as being – in any way ‘thinking’ having ‘ideas’ or ‘understanding’ because it is wrong – and it is done with a certain agenda in mind (which some critics have described as gaslighting):
   • 1. To protect investment
   • 1. To hoodwink
   • 1. And just plain lazy thinking
     • But these systems really are not – they are tools to optimise functions which describe patterns in data of one kind or another.
2. The other perspective is that many folks don’t have a good understanding of who or what we are – and the use of the term hallucination is interesting from that perspective because it has clues into just what we are – and the strong negative biases about thinking in certain ways what and who we are
   1. Let’s unpack that a bit … hallucination has a bad reputation for obvious reasons – in most cases if it is not your priests or shaman doing the hallucinating – then folks are not going to be the most productive in society
   1. But it is a wound worth picking at a bit, because it turns out that our well evolved sense of the world we consciously experience is not all it might seem;
   1. If you have ever been interested in actually reading any of the literature on consciousness you will have stumbled upon the domains of phenomenology; and westernised Buddhism (or event the original forms) – what have they to say – well one of the areas they bring into focus is the challenging notion of the self that is experiencing the “outside” world;
   1. If you are sceptical of some of the ideas thrown up in this literature, I have bad news for you; it is well supported by the latest studies in neuro science.
   1. So what is this ‘bad news’? 
      1. One part may be that if you read the work of Daniel Dennett, there is the idea roughly speaking that there is a part of the brain (or brain-body to be more correct) that is responsible for generating actions, and another that is responsible for interpreting actions (and explaining them to others through language, and indeed actually back to ourselves);
      1. What is so bad with that you ask? Well, it turns out that these insights are very unreliable and do not have superior insights to an outside observer; and studies of certain brain injuries show that different interpretations tend to be generated by different parts of the brain (left and right);
      1. So it suggests that our insights about ourselves are something of a fabrication … some say, equivalent to an hallucination – a plausible fabrication – and other evidence suggests – with a bias for explanation that is efficient to manufacture, i.e. the simpler the model the better; which further suggests they are often wrong … anyone trying to explain their behaviour late at night to a spouse in a failing relationship will be familiar with how floundering these self-descriptions can turn out to be;
      1. Thanks Jabe …
      1. There is more; what of the outside world? The hand I see so clearly before me …
      1. Erm, you might want to stop reading here. 
      1. It goes like this, the brain has no direct access to anything; everything is mediated; all it receives are chemical-electric signals down nerve pathways from a plethora of organs; and those organs don’t as such have ‘direct’ access to anything, so much as you could say the organs detect – pressure waves; or electro-magnetic radiation; and experience is all constructed – that dreaded word – a hallucination is created. 
      1. There is no such thing as the colour red; nor the taste of coca cola, the smell of Jasmin; the warmth of the sun; the sweet sound of the birds singing; those things just do not exist.
      1. Honestly, believe me, I have read loads on this … and come to the difficult belief that folks who have spent even longer than me thinking about this, and writing about it, are not wrong … there is much literature and debate you are welcome to dive into, but I am giving you a well-considered precis, anyhow I digress … 
      1. What do you mean there is no such thing as the taste of Budweiser, I just had one!!! Well, there are chemical-electrical signals with a pattern that repeats and your brain constructs a signature ‘experience’ for you; and you can ‘describe’ this to someone else using language, philosophers call the ‘quality’ of experiences ‘qualia’ and the great thought experiment you can play is – do you experience what we both call red as the same experience, the same qualia. Ok, over a couple of beers or three (Budweiser – the European one … Budweiser Budvar ) you are convinced you do. Well get this, we have three cones or rods I forget – red, green, and blue from which all colours are constructed on a TV set, but birds have four … so they definitely don’t experience red the same way as you … nor do bees because they see patterns on flowers we can’t see; and octopuses can see the polarisation of light which we can’t see …
      1. So what, well the argument here is that all experience is … well, a hallucination …
      1. Have you every had a dream? I hope so, and experienced a room, a shop, dog, pony, lemon, beer glass … all seemed quite real, well we tend to call them hallucinations when they don’t align with a useful alignment with external objects in the world we can interact with; but whilst sleeping that is ok;
      1. Whilst awake less so. But let me take you on a counter cultural diversion, if you have never strayed far from the path. There are these things folks ingest, mushrooms, mouldy bread and other such things that … well induce perceptions that are indistinguishable from ‘real common or garden perceptions’ but for things that are not there, or if you are a neuroscientist, things your brain is generating sense experiences of, fully expecting that there is a correlate, but … there isn’t
      1. Hmm, inconvenient … trouble is .. there is other literature that questions that there is a ‘real world out there at all’; and further literature that questions if there is a world in here, that is, if there is a ‘you’. That my friend is called Buddhism (western or otherwise); and dear me … there is quite a bit of western philosophy and indeed neuroscience that provides back up when it comes to a philosophical fist fight on the subject … damn … Jabe, help me out here, this is getting weird, and I just came here to understand a little more about predictive algorithms, not question my sanity and world view. Sincere apologies … 
      1. But, you can see why I get a bit irritated when the ‘Tech Bros, tell me that their technological toys are hallucinating, when they are behaving exactly as they should … these are features not bugs … and these same people would disparage the notion that every day perception is a hallucination; the frightening thing is … they are wrong on both counts.
      1. Fear not, #JabeOnAI is here to help you get to the end of the rainbow, click your heels twice … 

Is there any value to all this? Well, ultimately, yes, if you want to get ahead in this world; then truth is always helpful, ultimately. 

Where this gets interesting, is in understanding, where does what we say to each other come from, which bits can you trust, 

Ultimately, if you have a bunch of folks all trying to achieve something; and they have developed language which appears to reflect regularities in their sense experiences from this “mythical’ real world; then that is just about as good as it gets; unless you really are a solipsist…  and these folks are what those writing the literature call – communities of practice … now if you were to do something fancy, like take all this chatter from the community of practice and encode them as vectors in a vector space, you might just find the vectors only align well if these are aligned communities of practice – baking pizzas say, rather than measuring quarks in Switzerland, you say tomato and I say tomayto … and all that.

Why would that be useful; well if you want to build a predictive model

And the rub is that there really isn’t a common fully objective ground truth you can dig down to … and it all gets a bit post-modern … but hey, you did want to get all ontological and ask about. Consciousness and meaning, and artificial intelligence, did you really think this was going to be a pedestrian and straight forward journey … sorry to disappoint.

The funny thing is I have seen decades of this cognitive dissonance where folks are surprised when their ontologies don’t match or map; I am always amused and take the perspective, well from my viewpoint I would be more surprised if they did, and often get blank uncomprehending looks ,,, but that is another story … 

Espresso Martini

Exploring some counter cultural references, in particular the 1950s and 1960s scientific and cultural experiments with LSD; and the adjacent areas such as dance culture which also relate to how communities of practice generate, culture, language and ways of thinking and interacting with the world.

I want to help bring something to generation Z that I had. Something I mentioned in relation to the yellow heaven soup kitchen. 

I had been going to the Shoom club a while and it must have been in March 1988 or thereabouts – I had missed a few weeks getting obsessed about exams. I was smoking a Marlboro red (in a club remember that) and swigging on a can of full fat coca cola). And a track came on. By Todd Terry. You can “search it up” it starts with a siren like a rush (a day in a life – and all the folks around me kinda moved in unison). It became known as windmill dancing (or ‘big box’ little box) and was iconic of acid house. Seeing something cultural for the first time first hand, that later becomes ubiquitous through media is quite an uplifting experience. I thought what is this! OMG. a shiver went through me  – this wasn’t just a great club night. This as a thing. SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING ALL AROUND ME. Ineffable at the time. But something new. Something ours. Not belonging to thatcher’s yuppies. Or the 1960s boomers or the punk rockers. I was 17 years old, and this belonged to me and my friends. It was the birth of what became known as ‘Rave Music Culture’. The revolution was not being televised we were living it live and direct. It was ours. And that moment – of ownership of possibilities – has lived on with me every moment ever since.  Culture. Human connection being part of a community of practice visceral, raw counter cultural, not approved by the authorities. We believed. We knew we could change the world. That never went away. I would like to pass that on …

So what is your point Mr Generation X bore. 

My point is let’s avoid what guy debord called the society of the spectacle. Second hand mediated. Let’s celebrate our humanity. The possibility. Celebrate the potential that Timothy Leary celebrated in the PC back in 1994; what hypertext could be; what these tools subservient to us can be. Let’s fight to save our planet have let’s have some fun! 

To misquote Emenem: I am sick of you little tech bros with all your scheming. You just annoy me, and I have been sent here to destroy you!